Quotes About Diversity

When I was young, there weren't any teenage girls I could relate to in film. They were all put in boxes: the virginal good girl, the really sarcastic asexual one. I wanted to do something that represented how I felt then.

I write simple songs, and people like that. They're mature enough to appeal to people who aren't teenage girls. Most of my fans are older, and it's nice to think the songs can appeal to middle-aged men and women.

I'm Mexican-American. My dad was actually born in Mexico. He was raised up there, and he came back and forth to America pretty much his whole teenage years. My mom is from Sacramento, California, and she's a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl. She's a whitey.

My dad grew up in Nicaragua in his teenage years, then immigrated to the United States.

I am really very fond of Indian classical music though I have spent my teenage years in Bahrain.

My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.

I would say I was an all-American teenager.

Siouxsie Sioux was such an inspiration when I was a teenager because I connected with these goth college students who listened to this genre of music. She showed me that femininity didn't necessarily have to look the way that I was familiar with. It could be more exciting and much more identifiable.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

The 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family.

What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward.

My mum is black, my dad is white, and when I was a teenager, people would say, 'So what are you? Are you black? Or white? What are you more of?'

I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.

When I was a teenager, in the '80s, it was 'Dynasty.' It was 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And those were fantasies. Those weren't reflective of my experience. And I think we all want that; we all want to see ourselves, our story told, something to relate to, to help us and know that we're not freaks, that our experiences aren't odd.

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

I loved 'Terminator 2' as a teenager and 'Sound of Music' when I was a kid. I also loved 'Requiem For A Dream' as a college student and 'Mulholland Drive.' And I have loved 'Lincoln' as an adult. They are all the same, as they are all good stories and extraordinary actors.

I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music - jazz, swing, Motown, pop - and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.

There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse.

The guys love us - they think we're sexy - but the girls take us seriously... I've always said that when I was a teenager growing up, I wish I had girls like Salt-n-Pepa to look up to. If I'd had someone I could relate to, a lot of things would probably be different.

I didn't quite fit in in any particular, specific way. I was a gay teenager who was into drama.

A teenager can find lots of games, but that's not necessarily true for adults over 30. As you get older, you desire more intellectual, emotional experiences. If you look at film, there's many different genres. No matter how old you are, you can find the type of movie you like. That's a sign of a mature medium.

Issues to do with disability, mental health and not being neurotypical often affect many genuine teenagers but are rarely reflected in the fiction they read.

In the 1980s, there weren't a lot of role models for gay teenagers.

Gay teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight ones. I wish they knew that there's nothing wrong with them; that they are just a different shade of normal.