Quotes About Diversity

I have a West Coast rhythm section and a New York rhythm section. I've got them spread out all over the place.

I grew up in Vancouver, which is a pretty liberal, gay Mecca of the West coast. There's San Francisco, and then there's Vancouver.

I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a white girl, not going to be a rapper.

I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.

All the way on the West Coast, never having seen a Broadway show, it was like, 'They don't want me. There's nothing there for me.' I'd come to New York a lot and never even tried to see a Broadway show. There was no reason for me to do that.

The South Side loves me - I've got a song with Jermaine Dupri - and I've got songs on the East Coast and songs on the West Coast. Now, if I could just find me a rapper from up North.

I could have pigeonholed us and wrote a whole record like 'Pumped Up Kicks,' and we would have been this breezy, nostalgic West Coast Beach Boys recreation band. That's not the type of writer I am. Once I try one style, I move on.

I grew up on the West Coast during the '80s. But I wasn't a 'valley girl,' since I grew up in Norwalk, which was filled with Latina girls.

I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.

I got to see all of the west coast, which is so beautiful and so different from Kentucky. I also got to see a lot of the northeast during the snowy season. I had never experienced anything like that or temperatures like that. In 2017, I saw 47 states.

When I went to West Point, I was there with cadets from 50 other states and territories. Cadets from other countries, and you learn all of these things about our country, about our culture, our heritage, our ethnicity. At the end of the day, you come back, we all wear green, and we all consider ourselves an Army.

As I walk around, I have met 70-year-old women who live on the Upper West Side who love the show. And I met a couple in Kansas - a couple of truck drivers who drove around together - who loved it. It's popular all over the place and definitely in the gay community.

People used to feel oddly empowered to tell me all the reasons I couldn't win. Because I was a woman. Because I was a lesbian. Because I was from the West Side of Manhattan.

When I was running for speaker, people would go out of their way to point out why I wasn't going to win: 'You're a woman, you're too liberal, you're gay, you're from the West Side of Manhattan,' which in that context was an insult.

I lived in San Pedro, California, which is, you know, on the west side of California, and it's where many, many Japanese lived.

Love stories happen in communities outside of just the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I was a Spanish dancer. I don't mean to put that down, because that was great, too, but nothing like the kind of dancing you had to do in 'West Side Story,' which was called jazz.

I'd lived in West Virginia on and off for four to five years growing up. I'm familiar with Bible Belt, with Appalachia, 'Hillbilly Elegy.'

Families in Logan, West Virginia, were going through the same struggles as families in the Bronx, San Francisco, and Houston. This was not a West Virginia problem. This is an American problem, and it has to change.

I've told so many stories to so many friends of mine. I have friends in Pittsburgh, in West Virginia, and in Indy. That's three different demographics of people, and they all laughed, so I assumed that if I find something funny and all my friends find something funny, I hope people everywhere will find it funny.

My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.

The coal miners are working. But there's more than just coal miners in West Virginia.

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

I don't know why people have divided the whole world into two groups, west and east. Education is neither eastern nor western. Education is education and it's the right of every human being.