Quotes About Stigma

When a film fails, the lead actor is always blamed for it.

When you play on bad defensive teams, you get labeled as a bad defender.

I was teased at school for having a posh voice even though there was nothing posh about us.

Because I was fast, technical, and could dribble well, it was always the easy thing to label me just a winger and have me stick to that.

While the word 'bisexual' was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.

Though I technically come from a film family, my father had stopped making films even before my brother and I were born. So I did not really grow up in a filmi environment. And when I was growing up, becoming an actress was still quite a taboo. And you may not believe this, but even my father did not want me to join films.

With big folks, either people think you look mean or it's more of a jolly Santa Claus, 'Oh, he's just a pudgy little teddy bear pillow.'

I'm so fascinated by the concept of teen pregnancy for some reason. Not that I condone it or promote it, but it's just a very real thing in our country and culture.

People look down on teen moms and young mothers when they are the most gracious and significant women on this Earth. They sacrifice their freedom and their lives to give life.

I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said, 'We don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read.'

Society, they look down on teenage moms and dads, but I think those people are just jealous because they'll never know what it's like to be raised by someone who's still being raised.

At the time I came along, Hollywood's idea of teen movies meant there had to be a lot of nudity, usually involving boys in pursuit of sex, and pretty gross overall. Either that or a horror movie. And the last thing Hollywood wanted in their teen movies was teenagers!

Hollywood has the idea that movies have to be dumb. But especially movies for or about teenagers have to be really dumb!

When I was 14 or 15, I was in a small troupe for teenagers, and I heard somebody say, 'Oh, she'll never get anywhere. She's too common.'

We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien.

There aren't plus-sized teens represented in film who aren't made the butt of a joke.

Often, when you're growing up, you don't know what's wrong. We don't talk openly enough about mental illness. How do you know - especially today with the incredibly high stress teens are put under during high school - if you have depression or if you have a mental illness or if you have anxiety? You don't know, because you've never seen it.

I'd like to create a lovable character for schizophrenia; it doesn't have a celebrity spokesperson because by the time somebody's schizophrenic they've lost all their teeth.

Goldie has been around a lot longer than his gold teeth, than the golden locks. Not many people know me. He was a Rastafarian... They know Goldie the player, like my boys in Miami, or Goldie the graffiti writer, or Goldie the guy on the estate with the gold teeth, but nobody really knows that little boy from school, you know?

It's very hard, you know, for an Asian actor to be in a prime-time television series.

I went on French television for 20 minutes. It was very embarrassing to have to say, 'I'm not dead. I'm well. I'm not ill, and I don't have AIDS.' I hated doing it, because it was so insulting to those who really did have AIDS.

In movies and television shows, there has never been a really good Chinese lead. So often the Chinese look like they are very scared and shy.

I feel like it's extremely rare to find a female who's bisexual and not either lesbian or straight on television shows.

People with HIV and AIDS are nothing to be afraid of. They are people just like every single one of us, and each has a story to tell. These people should be helped, embraced, and not dismissed. We need to open our hearts and our minds to them, and we just may learn we're pretty much all the same.