Quotes About Representation

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

If you're going to write, then write a novel with a Haitian woman in it and try and describe her accurately. When you can do that, you can write about people.

There are so many actresses I want to write for. I see them, and I think, 'Why is she not playing that lead? What's happened to that actress?' I think all I can do is to write parts for women, to say, 'Keep going, keep acting, because there are parts for you. There will be those plays.'

One of my favorites is 'Parks and Recreation.' Great show; awesome writing; beautiful, diverse cast. They also have a very diverse writer's room, which I love.

What I try to keep in mind is that there are going to be a lot of articles that are going to be misrepresentative of what I'm about as a person and as a writer.

I know that in writer's rooms across North America, there are still conversations about how much is too much when it comes to intimacy between, in my case, two men. That's an insane conversation to be having.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

The farther away you writers stay, the better I like it. You know why? Because you're trying to create a bad image of me... you do it because I'm black and Puerto Rican, but I'm proud to be Puerto Rican.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

I always do a lot of work around characters to make them real people because, oftentimes, they really are a sliver of a person. Even with truly wonderful writers, women characters are there to emote, and they're often incredibly chaste or worthy. Or they're a 'different type of woman', which is the worst.

I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.

Over the years, the writers at DC Comics softened Wonder Woman's powers in ways that would have infuriated Marston. During the 1960s, she was hardly wondrous at all, less a heroic warrior than the tomboyish girl next door. It was no longer clear whether she was meant to empower the girls or captivate the boys.

I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized.

It's very important that we give a voice to the voiceless in terms of media; because media is a global phenom and it portrays you dependent upon what controls you have and the writers are doing great work.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.

There's a lot of Latinos right now, a lot of filmmakers and writers that are Latin too.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

People have tremendous power, more than the average person understands, and certainly more than even I understood before I came to Congress. When any of my constituents writes me a letter, I promise you, we're listening.

The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?