Quotes About Diversity

I want young children to savor and enjoy Tagore like I did since I was a child. He was too great a poet of India to be kept limited to Bengal. Everybody should read and celebrate him.

I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

In 'Blindspotting' I play a girl from Oakland, I've got an accent, I've got long, '90s 'Poetic Justice' braids, and in 'Monsters and Men' I play a girl from Brooklyn.

The historical legacy of 'The Best American Poetry' is they've had very few editors who were not white. They've had very few instances where they've selected poems by non-white poets.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

I think the poets and musicians, they belong to everybody.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

Federalism should be a meeting point of all groups.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

The beauty of being a feminist is that you get to be whatever you want. And that's the point.

My whole life, I've felt like I can do anything on the basketball court, from playing point guard in high school to having to play center one year in high school, doing everything in college and going through different roles in Philadelphia.

In fact, I would defend to the death their right to express a different point of view.

I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.

'Mission: Impossible' is fun. But for myself as an artist, I'm really more concerned with the human condition, the human experience, especially from an African American point of view.

People are not the only interesting organism on earth. From the point of view of scientific or commercial value, there are lots of interesting organisms.

There is this idea that it's very different from the French point of view to work in America blah, blah, blah. But I think it's different from one person to the other, not from one country to the other.

I have hidden my race for 22 books. I have hidden behind my married name, which is very Caucasian, because I didn't feel safe coming out with it. I didn't feel that the market would really accept me. I think I felt it's time to start bringing in an Asian-American point of view.

I grew up in Manhattan, and I've always had all kinds of people around me. I've always had a very 'live and let live' point of view.

There's nothing wrong with a male's point of view, obviously, but it's just a different way of telling a story.