Quotes About Diversity

That's the way New Orleans is. It's driven by the music.

I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's not a black-and-white type of thing down there. It's a very cultural place. Everybody has the same accent. It's not like if you're white we can't hang with you or anything like that. So it's easy for us to call each other out on our things.

I always have a little bit of Brazil and New Orleans in my band.

The only thing we try and do is just be a part of the gumbo that New Orleans is.

At the end of the day, I'm a New Orleans musician. Whatever that means.

New Orleans just embraces people who love music.

Everyone is unique to the way that they dance in New Orleans.

New Orleans has an incredible culture. Everybody brings up food first, but I realized there's a lot more to that in terms of music and art and people and history.

My family is from New Orleans. My grandma is French. Everybody else is from Mississippi - Creole people.

We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

There's something really unique about 'Orphan Black' is that it has a lot of female leads, so it's about a lot of women's stories, but it's not women's stories in terms of trying to find a guy or keep a guy; it's about entirely other things.

My son, who is five, was adopted from Ethiopia. My daughter was adopted from Guatemala. Her parents died of typhoid and malaria. We got her from an orphanage. They are the lights of my life.

I never thought I'd play an orthodox Jewish man.

I come from an orthodox Muslim family.

To the uninitiated, the Hasidim constitute a rather homogeneous sect of orthodox Jewry, but this is far from being true.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

A lot of young Latino actors have said to me, 'Why can't we get an Oscar? Why can't we be nominated?' And the terrible truth is that if you don't get the right parts, you're not going to be. Are you going to get an Oscar nomination for one of those Judd Apatow movies? Not likely, no matter what nationality you are.

I'm definitely interested in taking on roles where I don't look like myself. But I'm not saying I'm going to go out of my way to play a disabled person in order to win an Oscar.

If you think about it, I made history. Not only was I the first black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar, I was the first black British person.

When you're up for an Oscar, you just get offered everything. It's fantastic, but a lot of it you're completely inappropriate for.

I cannot absorb living in a world where I have an Oscar for best actress and Denzel doesn't have one for best actor.

One of my favorite - well, my favorite, favorite, absolute favorite event to go to is Alfre Woodard has a party that I call the blacktress party. It's, like, black actresses that either have been nominated for an Oscar or should have been, and it sort of is just a night where we all get in a room and we get to celebrate each other.

My dad won an Oscar in 1951 with an un-Anglicized name, the first Hispanic to ever win an Oscar, and the Academy is so intractable to this day.

One of my first real parts was 'Crash' - that won the Oscar.