Quotes About Identity

I've searched all of my life for approval from my dad who is not around. So if I can get approval by his fans or from peers and critics, it helps me.

I was the All-American kid, or so I told myself - good grades, never in trouble, bright future, well-respected by my peers. My favorite comedian was Bob Newhart.

People want to peg you as alternative R&B when they hear soul or see the color of your skin. It's comfortable when people see artists of color or artists that come from a different country to put that brand on us. It's just not as linear as that.

I chose my pen name when I was ten, because I knew even then that my legal name would be more trouble than it was worth.

I am proud to wear the name Le Pen.

It's always nice when people discover I'm a normal person and not, because of my appearance, a half-crazed lunatic who may stab them with a Bic pen.

I have always been a pencil.

I'm naturally a mousy blonde, so I dye my hair, and my eyebrows would disappear if I didn't get through at least a pencil a month.

At one time my name was on 50 or 60 different items, from dolls to pencil boxes.

It's a little bit embarrassing to say but... I wanted to be a penguin.

My mother is Afro-Caribbean and my father is Caucasian-American, and I was born in Pennsylvania and moved to the Cayman Islands when I was about 2. So I grew up there with my mother, and it's really all I know. I grew up there until it was time to go to college, and that's when I moved back to America.

I could write about coal miners in Northern Pennsylvania, and people would ask if I was writing about my dad.

I'm a Western Pennsylvania Democrat.

I wore No. 25 in college, so naturally when I arrived in Orlando, I wanted that number, but Nick Anderson had it. I decided to go with No. 1 because of my name, Penny.

If I had a penny for every time I've been asked if I'm going to work in America.

I wear Johnston & Murphy, not penny loafers.

I believe I never finished playing Sherry Palmer, that's why when the thought they shot and killed me, Penny's butt kept breathing on the floor, because I believe that she never died. I just feel like that's a character that I would want to play to feel a completion, because I never really completed playing her.

When you've lived in a country for 50 years and you pay your tax, you have a pension and insurance, you've raised a family and sent your kids to uni. To get to an age and be told you don't belong here and you have to go back to where you come from is really saddening and infuriating.

Gay people are made and not born.

I've always loved the idea of not being what people expect me to be.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

How can people change their minds about us if they don't know who we are?

I can see why people change. You get complimented all the time, driven around in a black SUV - your life is crazy. But that's your career, not you.

I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.