Quotes About Diversity

Living and performing in New York has allowed me to try my weirder and more experimental things.

If you were there behind every family's closed doors, everyone's a little wacko. Chances are that your family is no weirder than the next family or than the other girl at school's family. Everyone can be quirky at times, and I embrace that, personally.

We had South African accents. I was a vegan. I was raised without religion. I was just the weirdest kid in this small town, so I got made fun of a lot for it.

If I wasn't making a movie, I was trying to master a new musical instrument or trying to teach myself how to shave with a straight razor. I had to find the weirdest things just to increase my understanding of other cultures or other arts or intellectual pursuits.

I'm a straight guy and I date women, but I get on really well with gay guys. I'm very comfortable with my sexuality. The weirdest thing for me is when straight guys get really freaked out by gay guys. It's almost like they're insecure in their own sexuality. For me, I can be in a room full of gay men and have fun.

I feel like the most human among us are the weirdest among us. Those voices can be the most creative and the most special. You look around at your parents, your friends, your aunts and uncles, and you realize nobody is normal.

New York is like the weirdest city in the United States, in a great way, and Los Angeles is probably more similar to most of America.

I think 'weird' is an interesting way to say 'unique.' It has a strange connotation, but weird is good. If you embrace your weirdness, you'll be on the way to becoming who you are.

The one thing I loved so much about making 'Pitch Perfect 2' - especially in comparison to a movie like 'Ten Thousand Saints' - is you can go and be yourself, and you just know that all your weirdness and craziness and imperfections are completely embraced and accepted.

I think our team kind of strives on weirdness sometimes. We have that 'rah-rah, rally' sort of American mentality that we can all kind of get around.

Just being out in the world, you see so many things, and every day, you experience so many concepts and different people and their coolness and weirdness. It's a feast of ideas.

Embrace your weirdness!

Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.

I'd watch shows like 'The Kids in the Hall' or 'Twin Peaks,' and I'd see weird people being celebrated and appreciated without compromising their weirdness. On 'The Facts of Life,' I'd see girls who were pudgy, beautiful, popular, tomboyish - many ways of being female - and I'd feel quietly reassured.

We're all weirdos, and people want to work so hard to fit into society, but it's like, no matter what you do, you're never going to be what society depicts as what's perfect, because that's not real. The only point that you have to make is that 'I'm being me.'

We try not to think, 'right, we need someone who is a weirdo, someone who is competitive.' We definitely want five very different brains, but it normally starts with one person. For example, with series five, we asked Bob Mortimer because he is one of my absolute heroes and we sort of built it around him.

I'm a weirdo, but everybody's weird in some kind of way.

Not everybody needs to be a weirdo.

I don't mind being called a weirdo. There are a lot of people in hip-hop who are probably never going to get what I do. But, by just being myself, I end up touching a lot more people who might never have paid much attention to a female rapper.

I don't really relate to certain blokey men who just want to talk about blokey things. I never really know what to say and I always feel I have to act blokey in order to have them not say, 'You're a weirdo.'

The only concept or experience or core belief that I can attribute my other-ness to is that I just started out a weirdo and I stayed a weirdo. And it took me a long time to embrace my outsidership and see it as a strength rather than a weakness.

I feel like I am a lot of who I am because I watched these shows that said it was okay to be a total weirdo. Shows like 'Pete and Pete,' 'Hey, Dude,' 'Salute Your Shorts' - that's what I grew up with.

San Francisco has always been a haven for misfits and weirdos. I'm both of those, which is why I came here.

Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo.