Quotes About Stereotypes

I'm not a nerd, don't plan to be a nerd and read books - which I can't do at all.

Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.

I never read 'The Cinderella Complex' - I'm too afraid that my name might be in it.

I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'

It's a nonsense because, as we all know, there are brilliant 15-year-old readers and hopeless 50-year-old readers. All that categorisation is a matter of bookshop shelves rather than literary categories, I think.

My mother was a part of a reading group, but they would never come near science fiction because they think it's not for them.

I don't think kids have a problem reading books meant for adults; the problem is on the other side of the fence, a misconception of what one kind of literature is 'supposed' to be, perceived to be, as opposed to another: if it's for kids, it can't be any good; it's got to have been dumbed down and/or sweetened up.

A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.

People are very ready to criticize other people's accents. There's no correlation between accents and intelligence or accents and criminality, but people do make judgments.

Films are now made by accountants. They pick a pretty young female or male face out of the air and give them a part - not because they think that person is right for it or is ready for it, but because they think that person will make them money.

I can do so many accents that I'll never be able to use. There aren't casting calls for a black guy to play a Scottish highlander. I can hope. I've got my brogue ready. I just need the opportunity!

How many deaf people do you know in real life? Unless they live in a cave, or are 14, which seems to be true for most people in this business, what could I possibly tell them that they don't already know?

Audiences make their minds up about people they see on screen, just like they do in real life. That's what fascinates me in film. You see a character and have to think: is this person different to what I assumed he was when I first saw him?

Without sounding sexist, you have to cast a real man opposite Cate Blanchett. You need a guy who's grown up.

Every time a Hollywood director shoots a film about Africa that features a Western protagonist, I shake my head - because Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.

Women are often written as one thing - the ingenue or the vamp - but real women are many things.

I suppose I came to a realisation that being a serious actress and being on the cover of 'FHM' don't need to be mutually exclusive.

The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn't about aptitude.

We should realise that Hollywood is not obliged to write roles for Asian actors.

People say, 'When did you decide you were gay?' and you think, 'When did you decide you were heterosexual?' It's not a decision: it's something you gradually begin to realise about yourself.

I was always made to feel that men were desirable because of their masculinity, and for a boy, being feminine was not something you should be proud of. But, I came to realise it's OK for boys to be feminine, for girls to be masculine and we should all express ourselves however we want.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

I look young. I heard this said so often that it became irritating. I once worked as a babysitter for a woman who, the first time we met, said she didn't want somebody in high school. I was 22. Later, I realised that in certain places being female and looking 'young' meant it was more difficult to be taken seriously, so I turned to make-up.