Quotes About Identity

We are more than the work we perform. In fact, I'd say that our work is a mere representation of who we are underneath.

Bring your whole self to work. I don't believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.

Gary, who's wearing a coral shirt and white pants, growls to look tough. It doesn't work.

I couldn't work my way into being a good-looking guy.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

I deal with certain things in my work because of who I am. I make work in order to make people think.

You are a work of art.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

That said, I've never thought the fact that I'm a woman was important to my work.

As soon as we identify ourselves with the work we do, we feel miserable; but if we do not identify ourselves with it, we do not feel that misery.

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.

I didn't know who I was and I didn't know if what was in me was any good. But my parents taught me to believe in myself and to work until something happens.

Something happens to a woman when she can't reproduce. I've not had to walk that path, but I can only imagine when your organs don't work and how that could make you feel.

My life is basically my work.

I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.

I think she [Michelle Obama] is reluctant to date someone she's above at work. It's 1989, she's at a law firm, surrounded by mostly white men, and she has to prove herself every day.

Here is a fear for me, I never wanted to be one of those guys that was defined by a body of work 20 years old.

I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.

I've been pretty transparent with all that I've done. I think my work speaks a lot for who I am. So, I don't think there's a particular thing I'd like them to know.

Our lives are fictions, a work we leave behind, signed.

I do think that given my background as a poet, and also I work in a different field, you're sort of neither here nor there.

I don't think people want to see me as a regular guy. Besides, I'm a regular guy in real life. I guess I just want to be reckless in my work.

How is it that you live, and what is it you do?