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.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“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.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
Anna Deavere Smith
Born place: in Baltimore, MD, The United States
Born date September 18, 1950
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“She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people’s wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island.”
― Mordecai Richler, quote from Solomon Gursky Was Here
“It seems to make a difference to some girls. If you say something that isn't sexist to the right sort ofgirl, she likes you more. Say one of your mates is going on about how all girls are stupid, and you say 'not all girls are stupid,' then it can make you look good. There have to be girls listening, though, obviously. Otherwise it's a waste of time.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Slam
“For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
― Jeri Smith-Ready, quote from Shade
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