Anna Deavere Smith

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly. ”

I think that art is supposed to be ahead of the times. ”

I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way. ”

If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear. ”

When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not. ”

In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another. ”

I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way. ”

I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas. ”

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible. ”

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it. ”