Quotes About Identity

You have to know your identity. It's the biggest thing in wanting to pursue creative dreams.

I didn't look like Rihanna. I was a bit chubby. I had puppy fat. I had a moustache. I didn't want to have lips; I didn't want a bum. I grew out of it, but I feel like everyone went through that phase of wanting to be skinny.

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.

I come from a strong religious background, and I had a very conservative upbringing. So I was nervous, and confused. Here I was wanting to be Whitney Houston, so why did I have to dress in lingerie to do that? I didn't get it.

I'm kind of ashamed to be a celebrity. I don't understand wanting to read about other people's dirty laundry. I think celebrity is the biggest red herring society has ever pulled on itself.

If you're wanting glamorous or really beautiful or really sexy, well then, I wasn't really the one, but I could do all of that. You could just get really lost in that kind of image.

With albums like 'Rodeo,' 'Days Before Rodeo' and 'Owl Pharaoh,' I was really tuned into wanting to get people to understand my conscious and who I was mentally and who I am mentally.

I didn't go into 'Rabbit Hole' wanting to write about class. I think because of who I am it somehow found its way into it.

For me, understanding your heritage and wanting to leave a legacy was always important to me.

Hollywood, they make up these Latinos because they have a certain physical type or a certain name or whatever... It's not that easy. It's like me wanting to do a movie with an American actor, and I say, 'Hey listen, I have either Johnny Depp or Carrot Top.'

It took a long while for me to know that I'm beautiful. I remember going through this phase when I was younger of wanting to pass by mirrors and not look at them. That was so ridiculous. I've learned now that beauty starts from within.

And so much of my life has been about returning home and longing for home, wanting my children to know about my roots. And I thought I can't be the only one to feel this way so I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore.

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something.

In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.

I can think back to being four or five and not wanting to sit at the kids' table because I thought it was demeaning. I was this ridiculous little kid.

I was thinking about how we're so in touch with our image now. That conception of ourselves, in a very physical sense, can be oppressive. You find people wanting to be in dark places, not really see themselves, see themselves as a filtered image. A curated image.

There was a combination of not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, but also really not wanting to be stuck in Lord of the Rings for the rest of my life, and being desperate to kind of make sure that I could do something else with my life.

People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone's vision, because in the end, that's what you got: your clay in someone else's hands.

I'm not really wanting to be famous.

As everyone, you do end up becoming your mother, but also as you're acting, I find out you become every member of your family, bits come out without you really wanting them to come out.

I complained to my mother about wanting to look less like myself and more like my friends. My mother then gave me a lesson in embracing my differences and loving them despite what others said.

I had that thing of wanting to prove I was a tough kid.