Quotes About Identity

She had an inside and outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

Ah had too many feelin's tuh tell which one tuh follow so Ah didn't cry and Ah didn't do nothin' else. But then she kept on astin me how come mah baby look white. She asted me dat maybe twenty-five or thirty times, lak she got tuh sayin' dat and couldn't help herself. So Ah told her, 'Ah don't know nothin' but what Ah'm told tuh do, 'cause Ah ain't nothin' but uh nigger and uh slave.

Tea Cake love me in blue, so Ah wears it. Jody ain't never in his life picked out no color for me.

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn't know Ah wuzn't white till Ah was round six years old.

I began to worry a bit. Ella kept on hurling slurs. So I said, Come on, Big Sweet, we got to go to home. Nope, Ah ain't got to do nothin' but die and stay black.

Jus' cause you done set round and growed ruffles round yo' hips nobody can't mention fat 'thout you makin' out they talkin' bout you.

I'm an artist, and the need to get inside myself and be creative and be other people is a part of who I am. I don't imagine I'll abandon that completely.

The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.

I'll always be a Brit abroad, and I love London so much, but New York is my home.

Abroad in Hollywood, I am called Bling Bling Bappi.

When you're abroad, you always miss your country.

When you go to a club abroad and play against one from your own country, you are part of the enemy.

As citizens and children of India - whether we live at home or abroad - we must ask ourselves how we can add to our country's pride.

My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

I absorb energy, I absorb the good, the bad, I absorb everything. That's what makes me who I am.

I never really absorbed myself in a role like some actors do.

I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.

I write what I write in the way that I write it. I'm not being abstract, you know. I'm talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.

It would be absurd to say I'm not British - you can hear it when I speak.

Let me be abundantly clear: I am black, and I am a woman, and I embrace both of those facts.

I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.