Quotes About Identity

As a callow 18-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be.

Many for whom the stage has been the launch pad to cinema have forgotten their roots. I don't intend to, ever.

It's very hard for me to be myself when I'm not in shoulder pads.

I have my own autograph pads.

I know what it's like to turn the page of a magazine and not see anyone like you. It takes a lot, a lot, a lot of talking to yourself to confirm your self-worth.

I'm constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page - I didn't create the Wiki page, others did, and I'm flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it - and it said, 'Neil deGrasse is an atheist.'

I never wanted to be Keith Richards or Jimmy Page.

You have to examine a scene on the page first. Then you get into the basics of acting: Who are you? Who are you talking to? How do you feel about that person?

I've never had a MySpace or a Facebook page. I avoid that entirely.

Blues, rock and hip hop are more about a lifestyle and culture than notes on a page.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.

When I looked at 'Dear White People,' you have four African-American students who are all very different and who are trying to figure out who they are. They're dealing with identity issues and crises. That is exciting to me, to see African-American young people on a page, on a screen, who are so diverse and whose stories are all so different.

I must be very clear in one thing... Being a pageant girl is not who I am or what defines me.

I'm probably not going to shed all the pageant girl, because that's who I am. If you don't like it, that's too damn bad.

I've just found out there are pages on the internet dedicated to whether I'm gay or not.

When I was about 8, I used to go into one of the rooms in the mansion, and I would open a magazine like the 'Ladies Home Journal,' and I would see these characters on the pages and then become them, talking back and forth.

As a woman of color and curve model, I never imagined when I started modeling that I would be featured in the pages of 'Sports Illustrated.'

When I was growing up, 'Ebony Magazine' was a must read in our household. In those pages I found our news, our stories, and my pride.

I felt like I could never write nonfiction, because I would have to spend so many pages explaining my ethnic background, and that wasn't really the story that I ever was interested in telling.

Today, I believe everybody's their own brand, and everybody has their own brand and they curate their own brand on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

I could beat my mike stand into the stage, but I was still in pain. Maybe fans liked it, but sometimes people forget you're a person and they're more into the entertainment value. It's taken a long time to turn that around and give a strong show without it being a kamikaze show.