Quotes About Identity

I think a lot of people who say they are bisexual aren't.

Being bisexual doesn't mean I'm suddenly willy-nilly running around.

I don't think it's accepted naturally to be bisexual, especially as a woman.

I'm bisexual.

For many years I thought I was bisexual. And then I would ask myself, 'What is bisexual? Does that even exist?'

For me, there's a lot of erasure of bisexuality. I think a lot of people - especially in women - they tend to have really bad responses to it.

Bisexuality is normal in our society.

Writing in the voice of an American slave felt like I was biting off something very large.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.

All my main characters have got bits of me, bits of my family, bits of my friends.

You are what you decide you want to be. You can be some horrible, bitter person who's not a pleasure to be with. That's your choice.

I always felt like reality was a bizarre place, and everybody was really good at being normal, and I didn't know how to do it.

The idea of being a role model is bizarre.

I know how hard it is to be a woman, especially a black woman.

As much as I'm a black person from America, I'm a black person from Africa, too.

I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.

I'm not black myself, but my sons are.

Do you have any idea what Ali meant to black people? He was the leader of a nation, the leader of Black America. As a young black, at times I was ashamed of my color; I was ashamed of my hair. And Ali made me proud.

I wanted to be Amish when I was a kid. You just wear black and white - what could be better? One less thing to worry about.

There are so many aspects of human sexuality that we're afraid to talk about, because people still don't understand it. It's not just black and white, you know?

Binaries, whether it's 'man' or 'woman,' or 'black' and 'white,' were created to separate us. So without binary, there is only 'us,' which makes us all equal.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

The black community is my community - the LGBT community, too, and the female community. That is my community. That's me; it's who I am.