J. L. B. Smith Quotes

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.

The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.

I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

If you say a word often enough it becomes you.

I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to.

I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.

What my work is, is my approach to it. It's the practice. And my work is about the effort that I make to get there. And I think if there's anything artistic, it's in that middle space.

Art should take what is complex and render it simply. It takes a lot of skill, human understanding, stamina, courage, energy, and heart to do that.

My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.

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

Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you.

I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.

I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.

I mean, I think a healthy country is a country where people are healthy physically, and a smart country is a country where people are educated.

I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing.

I have never been in a violent movie or television show.

I have a lot of optimism about new doctors because I think it's really clear that it's a lot of hard work and no guarantee of a lot of money.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators "the haute couture of language."

For me, first of all, I love people, I love ideas.

I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they're going to spend their lives.

I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.

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

Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.

People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can't be attacked.

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

You hang around actors, or dancers, the minute you sneeze, everybody has a remedy, and we're all on a million different kinds of diets, and different kinds of things that we do for exercise.

Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.

A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.

Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.

If I have another child, I doubt I'll get married again. I don't think men particularly want to be with me.

Demons wait at crossroads attempting to influence our decisions.

The air was calm and insects had not yet risen off the water, that crisp time of morning before the sun strikes, when it is still cool enough to work out solutions to sticky problems.

I found that no food tastes as good as what it feels like to be healthy.

A smile can heal a thousand wounds.

I'm trying to do something that I have kind've a clue how to do.

I bought an organic rice milk. Frozen.....I'm not going to make something I don't know how to make, I don't have a recipe for.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

Ninety-eight per cent of laughter is nothing to do with jokes, which do not deserve to bear the weight of all the funny stuff in the world.

If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.

I like doing things I haven't learnt about yet. I've always been interested in art, and I love doing art.

Obviously I am not bothered about men's fashion - is anyone, apart from Jonathan Ross?

I find it hilarious that there are academics who try to analyse chemical changes in the brains of students while exposing them to gags.

About every four years, someone says to me, "I've got a friend who looks exactly like you." What can you say to this?

The history of the relationship between comedy and swimming is short indeed. Of course it is always funny when someone falls into water, but that's about it.

Acting in a stage play is like working the evening shift in an office.