Quotes About Identity

I never really knew what to do with my hair to begin with. When I was fat, I had incredibly long, unkempt hair. And there was kind of a poetic justice to losing something I was hiding behind.

In 'Blindspotting' I play a girl from Oakland, I've got an accent, I've got long, '90s 'Poetic Justice' braids, and in 'Monsters and Men' I play a girl from Brooklyn.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

I think it's poignant and powerful, this idea that if someone knows your name, they have the ability to kind of hail you and make demands upon you.

Most people in their lives do feel like they are outsiders at some point.

At the point when I wanted to become a designer, I didn't think about, 'Oh, but I'm a woman,' just like didn't think about like, well, 'I'm Chinese' or that 'I'm in Michigan.' You know, none of those things were obstacles to me. I just had this idea that this is what I had to do.

I was never that much a focus of interest that I became a 'thing' at an earlier point in my career. I'm aware of having become a 'thing' now, which doesn't give me a lot of pleasure.

I don't want to be called a point guard, but I can't stop it.

I wouldn't call myself a real point guard.

My 10th grade year I was 6-foot-4 and I grew to like 6-foot-7, but I still had my guard skills. I was playing point guard, I was a big guard. People started calling me 'Penny Hardaway' - comparing me to him because I was a big guard.