Quotes About Identity

Interestingly, when I look at pictures of me when I was five or six years old, I think I look pretty stylish.

I kind of say I am a stylish geek, to make myself feel better, but I am definitely a geek.

It's not easy to be stylish as a linebacker.

I've never had a stylist. My style is very distinctive from where I am from in Puerto Rico: a housing project in Carolina.

We never had a stylist, so I always wore my own clothes.

Sometimes I get to put on posh frocks and be Madam Glamour, the vendor of my wares. My lovely friend Kath, a stylist, puts me into things I'd never dream of. But my real life is very different. It's very, very home-based - an intense domestic life, that's the core of everything.

'Band on the Run' is a carefully composed, intricately designed personal statement that will make it impossible for anyone to classify Paul McCartney as a mere stylist again.

I always loved the look of musicians. I've always admired them because they have a look - when I was growing up, it seemed that the ones I liked didn't need to have a stylist.

I want to speak directly with a star, not her stylist.

If you had asked me growing up what a stylist does or what a magazine editor does, I would have had no clue - how do you research something like that when you are a first-born child of an immigrant who only grew up knowing doctor, engineer, and lawyer as careers?

I have never felt anchored when it comes to fashion. I've always had to depend on a stylist helping me to figure it out.

People talk to me about celebrities all the time and which ones do I admire, and it's so hard because you can't tell who's doing it for themselves and who hired a stylist.

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.

We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.

If you pretend to be somebody that you're not when you write songs - and I did that on some of the early Styx albums - nobody cares about what you have to say.

In the old days, a con man would be good looking, suave, well dressed, well spoken and presented themselves real well. Those days are gone because it's not necessary. The people committing these crimes are doing them from hundreds of miles away.

People think I have the benefit of a public school education. I have this suave and debonair label, but really, I'm as common as muck.

In our subconscious, we all know we're playing roles.

My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots - I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked.

Pop culture is like our subconscious.

Codes and signals are as important as explicit messages, and the two are linked. The bore pressing someone to tell them 'where they're really from' will see themselves as different to the aggressive stranger barking at someone to 'get back to their own country,' but the subconscious, if not explicit, message is the same.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

To be involved in the subculture of punk rock puts you in a minority.

My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I'm not unique.