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. – Anna Deavere Smith
I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it. – Ian MacKaye

