Quotes About Identity

I've had journalists asking me, 'What do we call you - is it handicapped, are you disabled, physically challenged?' I said, 'Well hopefully you could just call me Aimee. But if you have to describe it, I'm a bilateral below-the-knee amputee.'

Not only am I physically and emotionally attracted to women, I also wonder what being a woman would be like.

Most writers who leave their country physically have already left it mentally and emotionally.

Who a dancer is physically feeds into character for me. Always has.

My dad is my dad, but he's not there physically anymore. But she lets me call her 'Dad' - that's the last little piece of Dad I've got.

If I cannot sing, I have the impression that I no longer exist. I mean it. I mean that I am not physically there.

I grew up in a very 'Friday Night Lights,' sports-focused town. I did not play the sports. I was never bullied physically, but I was called names. I was also an overweight kid. I knew what it's like to feel like the other, to feel written off for things that were not in my control - my appearance, my interests.

I was a sickly child, not very strong physically. I wasn't really the greatest in school. I didn't really excel in anything particularly. But I was happy with who I was.

Even if I aspired to be in showbiz, I felt physically inadequate being compared to my parents.

Physically, no one would ever consider me for the serial-killer lady.

I was never physically abused, but when I came out to my parents late in life, when I was 27, they definitely had an intervention.

I had attached my life to basketball so closely that it made me physically ill.

When I was on the chubbier side, I thought that whatever God and whatever my body told me to be at that time, that's what it was. I'd say I grew more of an understanding about my body probably around my senior year in high school. I understood my body physically as an athlete.

My brother Carl became a physicist; I became an economist.

One of the best ways to change is to act as if you are the person you want to become. When you behave as if you are a different person, you change on a very basic level - even your physiology changes. When actors and actresses perform, their body chemistry is altered by the roles they play.

I wasn't good-looking like the heroes. But I had a good physique having been a goalkeeper. I was like a panther.

I changed it to Leslie Hill, only that seemed more like a cocktail pianist. Eventually, being an admirer of Jack Benny, I took his name.

I'm not really a pianist.

Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can't tell you.

Without a piano I don't know how to stand, don't know what to do with my hands.

I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing.

I can play piano, and I write everything on piano, but I don't really feel like a piano player, necessarily.

My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear's a bit bigger than my left - which showed up particularly in school photographs - so my mother used to call me her 'little Picasso.'

Of course we'd rather not see Picasso teacups and sheets.