Quotes About Identity

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.

All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.

There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.

By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and a Hindu only by accident of birth.

To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.

My grammar be's ebonics, gin tonics, and chronic.

I recognize the lion by his paw.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

If education tries to make other persons out of us than we essentially are, deeper inside, it stultifies, and reproach matters.

We already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development.

I had a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education

It's very important, when everyone else seems to be pigeon-holing you, to try and pigeon-hole yourself.

I'm not just writing songs that are narrating my life, but everyone else around my age because they're super-relatable.

I don't have a set style, but I try not to dress like everyone else.

I do speak my mind a lot more than when I was younger. I guess that's just my Polynesian background. That's how we are: just sit back and try and fit in, try and make everyone else happy.

I've been so low sometimes and when everyone else would be so high because I didn't like myself.

I don't like going to 155; I do it because everyone else does.

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you're saying, 'Our products are like everyone else's, too.'

You have to accept yourself so everyone else can.

I always knew who I was, but everyone else wanted to me to be their 'idea' of the 'right' artist. At times, I even believed them.