Anna Deavere Smith · 240 pages
Rating: (505 votes)
“We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.”
“You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.”
“Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn't come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing.”
“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”
“My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.”
“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”
“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”
“He had been trying to suppress the feeling Stephan roused in him, but in the end, such things were never controllable—they rose up. Sometimes like the bursting of a mortar shell, sometimes like the inexorable green spike of a crocus pushing through snow and ice—but they rose up. Was he in love with Stephan? There was no question of that. He liked and respected the Hanoverian, but there was no madness in it, no yearning. Did he want Stephan? A soft warmth in his loins, as though his blood had begun somehow to simmer over a low flame, suggested that he did.”
“I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.”
“That is the physics that all fearless types discover at some point—an appropriate ratcheting up of self-belief and energy when facing negative or even impossible circumstances. Fearless”
“Brimstone: '...I shall smite thee with my fightful blasting wand so that thy teeth shall drop out, thy skin shall wrinkle, thou shalt have boils on thy bottom and be subject to night sweats, ringing in the ears, falling sickness, flaking dandruff, arthritis, lumbago, uncontrollable dribbling, deafness, runny nose, and ingrowing toenails. Amen.”
“The Lassans were insatiably inquisitive, and the concept of privacy was almost unknown to them. A Please Do Not Disturb sign was often regarded as a personal challenge, which led to interesting complications...”
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