Quotes About Identity

When people ask me where I'm from, I say I'm from the Sudan. But when they ask what my hometown is, I say London. It's where I lived, and it's where my whole family lived.

I know that, me being from Sudan and London, it's a big honour to have even made it to the NBA.

Sudan is not Arab enough for Arabs and not African enough for Africans.

The governments of south Sudan must make sure that everybody will get a nationality - that nobody will become stateless because of this separation.

I only lived in Sudan until I was four years, so I cannot really relate to that. It is just a different lifestyle.

I'm from South Sudan, that is where my heart will always be.

I grew up without a father, who was kept a mystery to me. There was a sense of uprootedness, things being one day here and the next day not; a sense anything could happen. Then, all of a sudden, my mother met my stepfather, and her life became happier, and my life changed, my name changed.

You go from being with the guys all the time in the locker room, in practice, having a militarized brain in terms of this schedule, and then, all of a sudden, you are on your own. You lose a sense of purpose; you lose a sense of yourself. And you lose confidence. You find yourself saying, 'I was the best at this, and now I'm not the best.'

I started ninth grade a week after everybody else had started, and I didn't know anybody. I was in a chorus class, and they asked me to bring my guitar to school one day, which I did, and all of a sudden, people knew me... in the halls, people would start saying hello.

When you are in a band for a number of years you loose your identity in a way. You become a part of that band and then all of a sudden you are not part of that band. You are still the band without the other two members.

Because I think it's so easy to look at someone, regardless of where they grew up, where they came from, the language that they speak, to just look at the colour of their skin and all of a sudden reduce them to harmful stereotypes.

There's an identity crisis - a lot of us become mothers, and all of a sudden, we're expected to become these selfless people. That's not a really natural process. That, for me, never felt organic.

I've been writing the same book my whole life - that you're in one family, and all of a sudden, you're in another family, and it's not your choice, and you can't get out.

When I first started on television, people, and even my own manager at the time, would tell me I had to make all of these changes. But you have to stand up and say, 'There's nothing wrong with me or my shape or who I am; you're the one with the problem!' And when you can really believe that, all of a sudden other people start believing, too.

When the clothes change, the women change. They start feeling more confident and then all of a sudden, people start seeing them differently.

In the '50s, women aspired to dress like their mothers - this polished, controlled, formal way of dressing. Then all of a sudden in the '60s, going into the '70s, they stopped dressing like their mothers.

I love my fans, and I love my relationship with the fans, but when you're a performer, and you're used to being the mac daddy, the main cat, and all of a sudden you're not that guy anymore, it's kind of a whole different spectrum and a whole different level.

Nobody cared about Baron Davis for so long, and then all of a sudden, it's like all these articles are coming out. People are passing judgment or thinking they know me.

Now all of a sudden I'm so less interested in pretending to be a lot of other people, and much more interested in being me.

I was a chubby kid, an outsider, and then all of a sudden I shot up to 6 foot 2, and people started calling me handsome. I couldn't accept it; I couldn't see it.

In those days I was mortified, because I was a serious actor in my own mind, and then all of a sudden I'm this hunk.

I remember one day my son, our Robert, was looking at me on the settee and looking at me on the television, and then all of a sudden he said: 'Why don't you bring that pretty mummy home with you?' And I thought: 'Oh dear, I'm going to have to dress up at home now as well!'

It's kind of interesting to be a director who is all of a sudden being an actor playing an agent. This is my whole world!

I don't think anything can prepare you for a crew to come in and actually film you as yourself. It's kind of frightening to think that all of a sudden people are going to know how you are, and how you act on a day-to-day basis.