Quotes About Identity

I thought that God and rap would never work. I thought that God wasn't okay with rap. People knew I used to rap, and I went to the Bible studies. Someone said, 'Hey, you should rap about Jesus.'

I ended up going into the Master's program for Asian-American studies at UCLA, in part because I was passionate about it, but also because I wanted to keep acting in the theater group that we founded.

The thing I found in correlation with my studies as a history major was that experience taught me you have to figure out your background, where you come from, who you are, and what you want. All of that propelled me into following acting because I had to develop characters as well as develop characters' history which is most important.

No matter how many modern parts I do, people still refer to me as Mrs. Costume Drama. Fight Club is a studio pic, and I've done very few of those. I've got a feeling it's going to change things for me.

At the end of the day, if you don't have a record contract, a studio or a guitar, you can still write songs. You're still an artist. That's something no one can take away.

Some people say I appeared on the Phil Donahue show to tell 'my' sex change story but I've never appeared on his show for any reason... not even as a member of the studio audience.

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.

Dore Schary was then head of the studio and he wanted to change my name.

Actually, my true name is Rosa Dolores Alverio. And then I became Rosita Moreno when a stepfather stepped in. And when I got to MGM studios, which was my first film contract, they just thought that Rosita wasn't a good name, and they changed it to Rita. And yes, it was their idea.

In the contract days, the big studios groomed us to play particular roles and we would stay with the image they gave us and insisted on.

I hate the idea of people thinking that I'm just a little girl who goes into studios with pop producers, and they work their magic.

If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.

The studios always had their idea of what I was, and they'd give me the dumb-blonde roles.

How do we escape who we are? I think, going to college, I felt freer. I loved the clean slate. I wasn't known as the sort of nerdy, studious girl. I met gay people for the first time in my life. I needed that expansion from a very conservative little town.

Often I've had problems automatically bending to a lover's will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, 'This is what I love!'

By the time I finished school, I found out I wasn't qualified to study anything but music.

No matter what you study, the thing that you know best is what you grew up with.

My first memory - at about four - was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers the way I do.

Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.

The level of study that I was at, I was probably only about two or three years away from being ordained as a rabbi, so I really needed to figure out in my head where I wanted to go with things. And I just couldn't do it habitually anymore.

I think sometimes you can study guys and build them into giants that they are not.

I was actually going for the pre-medicine track and studying for my MCATs and then I decided to follow my passion, which was music. So I moved to India after college to re-immerse myself in Indian music.

Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.