Quotes About Identity

I'm the first to poke fun at myself when it comes to the hair. I even ask the audience 'hands up who had big hair in the 80s?'.

You're not allowed to give yourself a nickname. This holds true in life as well as in poker.

My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the 'elite.' If so, I damned well earned it.

I served the Poland that existed.

My name was originally John Collins, but I just didn't think it had the flair I needed. I found out the poet laureate of Poland was named Krasinski and so it seemed like a shoe-in for show business.

My great-grandparents came from Poland. Interestingly enough, they were named Adam and Eve. But I do not believe they are the original.

Being part of the E.U. in Poland means that for the first time in a millennium, nobody disputes Poland's borders, and it brought a level of freedom that Poland has never known before.

I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.

My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.

My father emigrated from Poland and my mother from Romania. There was no affluence in my family.

I always say I have two hearts - one beats for Poland and the other for Germany.

Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.

That is our dilemma in Poland. We don't like to be ruled by the East.

Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.

I have found my perfect place on earth in Poland, in Luslawice, near Krakow.

As polarized as we have been, we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country.

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

People know my lyrics; they know the stuff I've written, and it's all about life, love, happiness, and these big euphoric moments. It would always bug me when I'd go to a club, and they're playing some chick on a stripper pole on the monitor behind me. I'm like, 'So that's not what I do - that's the other guy.'

I always needle a bit when people say I'm a champion of the Poles, because I've always had a very multinational view of Poland.

Have you ever heard of Irish, Poles, Germans, Italians and Jews being integrated? They go anywhere and just enjoy their rights. Why call it integration when black folks do the same thing? It's a con job.

Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.

My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.

In high school, a teacher's friend in the police department asked me to go into a bar and flash a fake ID saying I was 21 even though I wasn't. They were assuming the bar wasn't carding people. Anyway, she forgot to ask for it back. I used it all freshman year in college.

I clearly remember my father cutting our jumpers and our sports clothes with scissors - because he didn't want us to wear jogging bottoms and hoodies. He thought that would somehow set the police on us.