Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Most things in life come as a surprise.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time.

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.

I believe sometimes we aren't always in charge of everything that we do creatively. We submit to things as we're going on our own journey.

There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.

My intuition comes up with better stuff than my head, I think.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

History had unexpected duties in store for us.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.

We expect surprises. There has to be surprises.

It feels like your subconscious can be way ahead of you, as a songwriter. You can write a song that you think is about one thing and months later you're playing it and thinking, hang on, this is completely informing where I am now.

Crisis is not a nine-to-five job... Crisis happens when you least expect it.

You can't prepare for something that you can't prepare for.

You have to be open to dreaming. It's a complicated language, but I'm obsessed with it.

The things that transpired in my life, they didn't happen in the order that they're supposed to, or are ideal. Everything just kind of fell in my lap at a young age. Things were thrown at me very fast.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.