Quotes About Representation

For the most part, I was surprised by the representation of female characters onscreen. I do hope that when we include more female storytellers, we will have more of the women that I recognize in my day to day life.

When I started publishing my work, one of the biggest surprises to me was the recurring question about my background and why I wasn't doing more stories about Asian-Americans.

It's not so surprising that there are more women in metal bands. And they're not just fronting them. There are drummers and guitar players, bass players.

Why is being a woman so surprising? There are two sexes. A man and a woman. So, if it's not a man in a movie, what else was it going to be?

Writers usually don't get to pick our own covers. I know it's surprising to hear that.

If you're writing a bi character, did you look at a lot of bi actors for the role? Did you really go and find people that identified as queer? If you did, then great, and if you didn't find anyone you liked in that pool, well, that's surprising. If you write a character that's trans, the time is now - cast a trans actor.

I hadn't looked at all the Nobel Prizes and thought, my goodness, there's no women. So it was a little bit surprising to me.

Scripts specify 'minority' when it doesn't seem necessary. Given this is a traditionally liberal and progressive industry, it's surprisingly backwards.

I don't believe that a female character needs to surrender her femininity in order to be an action hero.

I just don't know when, as a society... it sort of only became OK to represent gay people in the traditional sense, where they have a great job and well-adjusted parents and maybe a surrogate or adopted child. When was that the only way you could represent gay people?

I've never been a surrogate for Bernie, Hillary, or the DNC.

When I created Buffy, I wanted to create a female icon, but I also wanted to be very careful to surround her with men that not only have no problem with the idea of a female leader, but were in fact engaged and even attracted to the idea.

We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody had to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union, or what have you, expects some consideration in return.

There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter," says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters' version?

A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways.

I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn't need to be aware and, often, isn't.

More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Paris is often described as reading, as though the city itself were a huge anthology of tales. It exerts a magnetic attraction over its citizens and its visitors, for it has always been the capital of refugees and exiles as well as of France.

the task of finding one's own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as savages or the servants or the people who don't matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter

This is what we mean by democracy: that everyone has a voice, that no one gets away with things just because of their wealth, power, race, or gender.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.