Quotes About Identity

The amount of love I get from India, from Pakistan, from Asia, from Persia, Malaysia - people are just like, 'Brown boy doing it, brown boy doing it!'

I grew up eating and loving Persian food, going to school, and everyone making fun of me.

I was Persian-American, but I hated bringing Persian food to school. I just didn't want to stand out in that way. I wanted to be like everybody else.

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

Medicine, anything academic, is a very Persian Iranian route to take in life, in one's career.

The fashion industry may persist to label me as 'plus-size,' but I like to think of it as 'my size.'

The fashion industry might persist to label me as plus-sized, but I like to think of it as my-sized.

What does it mean to be Catholic and not a Catholic? I feel adrift, homeless. My Catholic imagination allows me to see the soul as a lit breath, seeking the divine. It persists.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

Your image isn't your character. Character is what you are as a person.

Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn't get serious with people. They don't expect it from you, and they don't want to see it. You're not entitled to be serious, you're a clown.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

I'm a good person and that's what I am at the end of the day.

Normality is to be different. Every person is a different person. And one day you need to be aware of your difference. Aware that you are not the same as the others. That is to be normal.

Circumstances don't make a person; they reveal him or her.

I'm not interested in a persona.

The Anne you see on TV is me; I don't have an on-camera persona.

I'd rather be dealt with as a person than a persona.

I definitely have a stage persona. I don't walk around scowling at people too often.

Bowie is just a persona. He's a singer, an entertainer. David Jones is a man I met.

If you change a woman's look, you change her persona.

To become a star is the beginning of the end. I don't really want to be saddled with a screen persona.

You get to a new school, and you're the new guy, or you're the foreigner, or you're the guy with the funny accent. That first day at school was a whole new opportunity to create a new persona.

It's not until you develop your own voice, your own persona onstage that you become your own comic, who you really are.