Quotes About Identity

Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying the masters. Rock and roll was white kids trying to make black music and failing, gloriously!

I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.

All Italians speak Spanish without studying.

I really think that studying theater early on really helped me to be able to identify how to get into a character, because it's such a mysterious thing. Learning objective acting in the beginning of my career was the best thing I could have ever done.

I really got the 'Rhoda' flavor from studying my stepmother, Angela, who's Italian, not Jewish. There's really so little difference between the speech patterns and family attitudes of Jews and Italians in the New York area, anyway.

I was black, studying physics and engineering. I was from a small school nobody ever heard of.

I was studying to be a doctor like every good Indian boy, and doing music on the side as a hobby. Then I started to get a little serious and record companies started giving me offers!

There were screaming girls, I had to learn as a blind person how to run to a limousine otherwise they'd take my clothes off and stuff. I thought to myself 'how could this happen?' I mean I could see it, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, but Jose Feliciano? It was a mystery to me.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

I've done lots of songs for film soundtracks and things like that - stuff I'm not ashamed of, but that doesn't represent my legacy with the Pretenders.

Transsexuals are amazing. You have all the great stuff in one place.

I've never been like Angelina Jolie, who at one time was spewing out this prototype Bad Girl stuff for people to consume. I've never boxed myself in that way. People can create boxes for me by all means, but it doesn't mean I'm going to step inside them.

In an ideal world, I wouldn't have to change my body. I wouldn't have to do all this stuff. I wouldn't have to be pretty or 'feminine,' and people would respect that.

As a black woman I always felt growing up I had to do above and beyond stuff to be noticed, to feel like I could hang with everybody else.

There's all sorts of stuff people want to publish anonymously.

I felt like, for so many years - and I still even feel it - as a girl, you can't really expect to go on stage and dress like a boy and jump around and scream with the audience and mosh and stuff, and every time that happens, I feel really proud.

There's not a day in my life I'm not proud of being gay, but I just wasn't ready for that attention to be placed on it. I remember being on Oprah. Well, not on Oprah. Near Oprah. She started saying, 'Now, Nathan, you got all those girlie moves going down in 'The Birdcage,' where's all that coming from? You're so good at all that girlie stuff!'

With social media, with Instagram and selfies and all these apps that are trying to make you look perfect... it's hard for girls to grow up nowadays with all that stuff.

I like doing the editorial stuff because it's nice to do something that's more me. But modeling for brands and the things to make money... I guess I don't really like being the mannequin. It's a very strange concept.

I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.

I wore a padded bra every single day and night from the age of 14 until I was 31. Giving up padding was my New Year's resolution. I had known for ages that wearing a stuffed bra was a form of hiding my real body.

It took me a long time to stumble upon a sound, and I figured out I wanted to kinda sing rapper's lyrics.

I had adapted to the blonde. So when they told me I'm going back to do these five episodes of 'Arrow', I was clearly really excited, but when they said I couldn't be blonde, it stung a little.

Hey, Ryan, if Sting retires, will he change his name to Stung?