Quotes About Stereotypes

In the West, audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero.

Living in the West, you see how there's only two versions of how Asian men are supposed to be. Either they're very nice, yuppie husbands with children in ads, or they're IT geeks.

West Hollywood is predominantly gay, so every man that came into the grocery store was shopping for his boyfriend.

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

I think a case could be made that there's sort of a crisis of masculinity in the West. Particularly with white males.

Of course we've been fighting against stereotypes from Day One at East West. That's the reason we formed: to combat that, and to show we are capable of more than just fulfilling the stereotypes - waiter, laundryman, gardener, martial artist, villain.

I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

People used to feel oddly empowered to tell me all the reasons I couldn't win. Because I was a woman. Because I was a lesbian. Because I was from the West Side of Manhattan.

When I was running for speaker, people would go out of their way to point out why I wasn't going to win: 'You're a woman, you're too liberal, you're gay, you're from the West Side of Manhattan,' which in that context was an insult.

People in West Virginia do have cars. We have indoor plumbing. We even use knives and forks.

The great western error about the Taliban is to assume homogeneity.

Western beauty is considered the dominant beauty in the world. Tall, blond, blue eyes. I always felt a little self-conscious because I wanted to be more Caucasian. I tried to get bigger eyes... I would dress preppy.

In spite of this fact, the Western powers have never given sufficient importance to the Muslim world. They have always been inclined to treat it as a big backward and lethargic child.

It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

Since I was a baby my goal was to be on TV because film was just impossible - you never got any Asian women in Western cinema. I grew up wanting to be in 'East-Enders' because film wasn't even a dream. The community were very much like, 'How can you want to act? It's such a low-class profession.'

A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.

As a Western woman in the Middle East, I am often put in a different category. I am sort of like the third sex. I am not treated like a man. I am not treated like a woman. I am just treated like a journalist. That is usually really helpful.

My experience growing up in a rough and tumble town in the blue-collar world of Western Pennsylvania in the 1970s was that anything a man did was always more important than anything a woman did.

It would be impossible to be a woman in Western culture and not have your own issues about your image and what you look like.

We're used to saying that women in other cultures are oppressed, but the question that I had when making the film was: Isn't the objectification of a woman's body that we often see in Western culture another kind of oppression?

Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims?

You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.

My mum thought my TV and film addiction was laziness. If you're an immigrant, you know you'll never be an accepted part of society, but you hope your children will be, and you try to make them essential to the community in a practical way - being a doctor or a lawyer. Acting was beyond their comprehension.