Quotes About Identity

I've been a teenager. I even feel like I've been a 16-year-old girl. So I have a lot of voices inside my head!

What we try to do at Disney and through Disney character voices is really maintain the integrity of our classic characters at all costs. So Ariel needs to be me for every project, and if there are any other Ariels floating around out there, it's not necessarily Disney.

I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.

There are a lot of great artists with great voices who aren't singing what they should be singing.

I don't sing very loud, which some people have given me trouble about, but we all have to figure out what our voices are, embrace that.

I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.

I never noticed my voice. I did become aware as a little kid at camp that I liked doing accents. We'd do plays and skits, and I realized I loved speaking in voices that weren't my own.

Two years after drama school, I had a nervous breakdown: I heard voices, and the voice I heard in my head was Martin Luther King's.

Growing up, I listened to a lot of everything - I fell in love with music, when I discovered people like Lauryn Hill and Tracy Chapman, people whose voices I could really feel, people with a lot of soul. That's what I'm drawn to as a musician: Anybody that has their own voice and their own point of view.

In the late 1960s, English artists like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker began recording in the States, and at that point, they realised, 'We can get real African-American voices on our records; we don't have to pretend any more.'

When I was growing up... I'm not going to say I listened to everything, but when it comes to vocals, I was really adamant about imitating all kinds of voices.

I feel like, throughout 'True Romance,' I was unsure of myself in terms of songwriting. Even though it was my voice, I feel there were a lot of other voices on that record, too.

Particularly in television, we can stereotype ourselves. You realize that we all have a lot of voices in our head. We have angry voices, we have voices of doubt, and we have moments of strength.

They would call me 'The Cleaner' because I would replace boys who were real adolescents, and their voices completely changed, and they couldn't do the voices anymore.

The more queer characters I play over my years of working as an actor, and the more I see other young artists stepping up with the same intention I have, to make space for the voices of a generation of people who may not fit the status-quo, the more it inspires me to keep going.

The women like us because we're the first real women rappers, and the men like us because we're strong. We're not some soft little rappers with soft little voices. The men who see us end up going, 'Hey! They're kickin' it!'

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.

'S.N.L.' is the comedy establishment. Of course you want to go through that, because you want that stamp of approval. But it has its own identity, and our voices didn't mesh for whatever reason - or they decided we didn't belong.

When I'm playing an American, I don't play Lennie with an American accent. They're American characters who look like me, but they have different voices.

I'm interested in stories being told by marginalized voices and, specifically, people of color.

There are so many voices that tell people, especially queer people, that they don't have importance and regality.

As far as I'm concerned, the voices of Washington, black Washington, it's poetry, man. There's beauty in it.

I have been 'absorbing' people - their voices, their mannerisms - all my life, to the point where I am a sort of Frankenstein of different people. My own speaking voice is, in fact, a mixture of how my two best mates speak, because they are cool, and I am not.

As I traveled around the country on a book tour for 'In Harm's Way,' I began learning how certain Indianapolis survivors had heard these voices - not necessarily the voice of God, but often that of someone who had fostered them and imparted an identity as a person who doesn't quit.