Quotes About Identity

In a lot of ways I would love to be another student and love to be looked at as a Duke student and a senior and psych major and someone on the basketball team instead of Duke's polarizing, lightning rod, Grayson Allen villain, all those types of things.

I played every kind of role In Canada except that of a villain.

I don't want to be typed as a villain or a comedian. One would be as bad as the other. I had to fight that sort of thing several times in my life. And it's painful because it consists of turning down money to do a role.

What kind of villain would I be? I've never been convicted of anything that they said I was.

Contrary to popular belief, I don't just play dreadful old villains.

I was a relatively anonymous guy, and for whatever reason, I became one of the villains for the Right.

I'm not interested in the heroes or the villains. I'm interested in playing people.

Are people raised to be villains or vilified like I have become?

I feel like there's different kinds of evil and there's different kinds of villains, and as much as I would like to be dark and playing with knives... it's not me and it's not my look.

If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.

I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.

What I saw in Black Lightning, Jefferson Pierce, even the villains, are aspects of myself.

I'm very proud that I can be myself. I'm not trying to be Arabic, I'm just being me, and I happen to be Arabic. I think that might be refreshing to some people, and it's a bit more realistic than these pantomime villains we've seen before.

Why can't I ever play a nice, normal, salt-of-the-earth type? Is there something I should know? It's fun to play villains and character roles, of course - but I'm sure it's also fun to be a really big star and play the lead in everything, where all you have to do is show up and not blink.

Ever since I was a kid and growing up and watching things like the 'Naked Gun' movies, there was always this stereotype about how Arabs were perceived and portrayed. I've never watched those Arab villains in the movie and felt like that was me.

We are tagged as comedians, villains, etc. but those are just character traits of a role and there is no need for differentiation.

This I realized very late, that villain remains villain and are never able to become artists. We are never counted as actors and always addressed as villains.

I hope that every film I make has something to offer in the area of making people feel either vindicated or different in terms of who they are.

I'll always identify with the image of a strong woman. I believe that in what I do and in my sense of self, there's a vindication of women. There's power.

Identity politics preaches a splintering of one large, collaborative group into competing vindictive ones - resulting in new, angry tribes whose central thesis is to not cooperate.

One of the biggest misconceptions that has been thrown out there is the fact that I started on Vine.

'The Outsiders' died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback.

I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one. In fact I believe that if I weren't to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn't be able to write it at all.

My actual biggest claim to fame is that - basically, this sounds awful and really pretentious - but my Twitter is verified. And if you're already verified on Twitter, then your Vine is automatically verified.