“ Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain. Anne Deavere Smith
“ Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when pe… Anne Deavere Smith
“ Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not. Anne Deavere Smith
“ I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me — “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” — I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words… Anne Deavere Smith
“ We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It’s the ver… Anne Deavere Smith
“ The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. It’s a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no “pure” language. The only “pure lang… Anne Deavere Smith
