Quotes About Identity

We have named our kids Ryan and Krishank. Well, Ryan is also called as Sultan as he is a survivor and had a long struggle with life.

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.

You can't take our people from Africa and put us in a diaspora and spread us all over the world. And we survived slavery - and we can't pass a test? ... And you're gonna tell me we can't learn how to write? Have you lost your mind? We are survivors. That's all we do is survive.

Phil is a child of Holocaust survivors.

I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.

I thought I would keep the first name Susan and change the last name but I picked up this book and as I opened it the lead character in it was called Morgan Brittany.

I don't look like Susan Boyle!

'Suddenly Susan' is my life.

I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.

In Hebrew, the name Susan means 'graceful lily' - in Khmer, it means 'girl with the bad puns,' and in ancient Aztec, it translates as 'she with the cockerel hair and dirty glasses.'

We've seen people who have a 'make-under' just to try and recapture that Susan Boyle moment but it doesn't work like that.

Being able to incorporate my language into songs is really cool. It's really cool to see that people are susceptible to it. It helps with writing a lot to turn off one language and then go to another.

I think I've grown up in a mixed environment, and maybe a lot of the time I haven't really belonged anywhere in the way I've dreamt of belonging to, you know, living on the street and playing to all the kids on the street, growing up together. I suppose 'Raw Like Sushi' was a place where all of those things could come together.

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

I love Somali foods like canjeero, a pancakelike bread; same for pizza, burgers, and sushi.

When I'm overseas, I suspect I look like Mr. Bean.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

I suspect that some apparently homosexual people are really heterosexuals who deeply phobic about the opposite sex or have other emotional problems.

I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.

I suspect that a lot of studio executives still think of me as 'what's-his-name'.

In the mainstream, I'm suspect because I'm black. I have dreadlocks, I have a goatee. I mean, I'm just suspect. In my classroom and at Columbia, I'm not as suspect because it's clear I know what I'm doing, but I am still suspect.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but there's a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect.

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.

There's a lot of risk in putting what you suspect you really are into your music.