Quotes About Representation

In the end, I play a lot of friends and I really think it's about time that some ethnic girls get out there in the lead part. So we're developing something.

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that "the way it really was" half the time is, and half the time isn't, the way it ought to be in the novel.

You have got to have an agent. Its a business. But I think there is a way to be artful and commercial at the same time.

I still think that it's time for something that reflects the American people.

The Internet has brought democracy to so many other things. It's about time the Internet brought democracy to democracy.

For a long time, TV was just the land of handsome, beautiful people, and now it's the opposite.

It was trying to break down the stereotypes and it was the kind of thing where, for the first time, women were on a par and not seen as just objects. Though girls were objectified still.

Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.

We need more filmmakers of color telling the story. I'd like to see more filmmakers take their products out independently, put together a good commercial film and distribute it online.

Perhaps he owed her an apology. But he did not want to apologize. For she represented all that had always most irritated him about the ladies who had crossed his path down the years. The entitlement. The assumption of superiority and power

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

For me it was a simple moral step of extending that vision out into the world, for what are dogs but affable emissaries from the animal kingdom?

As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

When you don't wear a hijab, you discourage other Muslim women from wearing it. Also, wearing hijab makes you a message. Imagine you are Muslim walking around this square and you see a woman in hijab and you feel happy!…You think to yourself, 'Look, there are Muslims here!' You become a happy signal.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.

Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models.

Indeed, it's not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.

I'd long believed that the more perspectives around a table, the better an organization performed, and I took pride in the fact that we'd recruited the most diverse cabinet in history.

elections alone don't produce a functioning democracy;

But at no stage in my political career had I made environmental issues my calling card. Not because I didn't consider them important but because for my constituents, many of whom were working-class, poor air quality or industrial runoff took a backseat to the need for better housing, education, healthcare, and jobs. I figured somebody else could worry about the trees.

No age, race, class, or body type appeared unrepresented. There was even one ancient-looking character dressed as Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, complete with a long white cloak, a pluming white beard, and a sturdy wooden staff on top of which he'd somehow managed to mount a small video monitor, looping a clip of my JJ Dinner speech.

Carl Sandburg poem come to life. There were inner-city kids jostling one another on a field trip, well-coiffed bankers working their flip phones, farmers in seed caps looking to widen the locks that allowed industrial barges to take their crops to market. You'd see Latina moms looking to fund a new day-care center and middle-aged biker crews, complete with muttonchops and leather jackets, trying to stop yet another legislative effort to make them wear helmets.

When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly—the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party.