Quotes About Identity

I could only dimly articulate it then, but I think I believed that Art would give me entry into a no-man's-land where the laws of straight no longer applied. And that once I touched the soul of another artist, a comrade in arms, the bodies would fall into place like folds of a garment, twining us in a passion of the flesh. Pretty high-falutin', and an awful lot of effort just to get a man to go to bed with you.

All I would have to do was not exist below the waist, and the future was mine.

Yet that's how it felt for years and years -- that Andover ground me beneath the heel of its Bass Weejuns because it needed losers to make its golden Adonises shine even brighter. I wandered through so lost and sad, I can't believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I would have said, by which I would have meant Everything .

A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay.

I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.

Being different was about something more than just our dicks.

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back.

It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.

The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become.

When you know who you are, it's harder for people to fuck with you.

I know white folks, they can't take it. Because all of their lives, white people have been told they're the shit. White people always told you 'You're the best, you're everything, you're wonderful, you come from heaven, you're eve-ry-thing, you've never done nothing to nobody, you wear the white hat, you're the good fucking guy,' and the minute they hear [a] a nigga talking about [race] it freaks em.

When you know who you are, it's harder for people to fuck with you. Hollywood is dangerous because the great hobby they have in that town is fucking with other people. Building you up, knocking you down, until finally you are destroyed. They all want to create you and mold you.

What Richard wants is what I want, what everyone in the world wants. To be accepted, to be loved for who we are, not for some playacting phony version of ourselves.

When I imitate middle-class white speech, I see a flicker of unease cross the faces of the white people in the audience. Then, when I go into ghetto riff, the smiles return. They're fine as long as I am making fun of the same kind of people they make fun of, chinks and spics and niggers. But as soon as I start talking about them, I can clear a room.

The labels on the little bottles and boxes do not tell you which one is the sleeping pill. Instead they have names, long strange names that slide out of shape while you are reading them. They sound like kings from history or alien planets. There are hundreds of them.

It doesn't matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you're right in the middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn't work – it's like that, or maybe it isn't, because you also feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody's throat….

You're only who you think you are until you aren't anymore. And it isn't up to you. It's up to time. Life is timing. The test of time. We all have to take it, and none of us pass. No matter how hard you study. Perfect attendance. All that homework. Extracurricular activities. You're still getting an F, just like everyone else. Finite. Failed. Fucked.

I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.

when u have no enemies ,you are characterless.

For some people [blues music] is infinitely glamorous, for others it is a symbol of the oppression of a racial minority.

Freud was not a scientist, although that's the way he thought of himself.

In essence, it is not what it looks like but what it does that defines a symbol.

Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.