Quotes About Identity

I'm stuck with being No. 32 for the Cleveland Browns. I can't do anything about that, and I don't' want to do anything about it.

Imagine if somebody said your nose is too big or your ears stick out. For me, it was my neck was too short. It stuck with me all my life.

I don't think the narrative I was stuck in - the 'black' designer category - was going to go away anytime soon.

There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.

I am not chocolate and definitely not a boy. I am a man, and I have no clue how this image has stuck to me despite all these years. I think, maybe, in spite of trying to shell off my chocolate boy image, love stories excite me, and somehow I land up in such roles.

I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.

I don't think that one thing defines me, but I know that by coming out the way that I did, sort of almost pioneering it in action sports - to take that stand - that it's always going to be a label that is stuck with me, and I know that I'll always be the 'gay skier,' and it actually doesn't bother me.

Deep down inside, I'm really a black girl stuck in a Mexican girl's body. But I'm also in touch with my inner white girl and my inner Asian girl. I feel like a little bit of everybody.

I am Michael Render - that's what my mom named me. 'Killer Mike' is what my dumb friends called me in a rap battle once, and it stuck.

I'm still stuck in the '90s in a lot of ways.

I had it just Lil Nas at first because every rapper has a 'lil' in front of his name, and that's funny to me. But then I got stuck with it because I already built a fan base at that point.

I always knew what I had, and I knew I was more than just 'the foreign guy.' I have personality, and as soon as I had chance to show it, I just did it. A lot of people don't like it, and a lot of people frown upon it and think I should just be stuck in that box, but it's just not me.

I've always had my ear pierced with a diamond stud. I did it myself when I was 16.

I don't really consider myself a stud.

To be completely honest, I think if I hadn't been bullied into the band, I would have been happier as an art student. I would have been happier in a Brian Eno world.

When I was in high school, I was a bad kid and a good student.

'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.

It's actually really great to be a student and an actor, because I get to do this job that I love, then just when I think my head might explode, I get to go to school where they don't really care about what magazine cover I'm on.

I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. That's how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.

Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone's definition of an all-American girl - attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?

Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print - writing in English, interviewing Americans - validated my presence here.

The Chinese Student Association at Cornell put together their own play. It was all Asian people in the cast except for me, because they wanted to do a couple of scenes about an interracial relationship. I was the only non-Asian person on stage; the entire audience was Asian apart from my 10 friends that showed up.

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America - my parents were born in Cuba - and we didn't yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car.