Quotes About Identity

I had a nickname in junior high, and I'm loathe to say this: 'potato lady.'

The first time I had a baked potato, I was eight years old at a friend's house. Most white kids growing up have a baked potato every day. I didn't even know what to do with it, how to open it. I was the only white kid in high school eating octopus.

You know the way it is: sometimes Americans think of us as their backward little cousin. It's the whole shamrock, potatoes, famine, leprechaun thing, all that drunken paddies rubbish.

I never heard anything about 'potatoes' or 'kanaken' during my time in the national team. However I have been called 'potato,' too.

I think the idea of losing your hair is still very potent, emotional thing.

What makes clothing so potent is that people incorporate the fashion that they're wearing into their identity. It becomes part of you and how you show yourself to the world.

In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.

Celebrity culture is... it's not something that I'm attracted to. I guess I don't think of myself in that way, but potentially other people do. I feel I'm at the far periphery of that.

I feel that everyone has a Hulk inside, and each of our Hulks is both scary and, potentially, pleasurable. That's the scariest thing about them.

For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.

I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.

I've experienced colorism in that way: where if you're lighter, then you'll potentially be accepted into society better than if you were darker-skinned.

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

I was working on 'Harry Potter' while I was growing up, and the attention it brought me made me feel quite isolated.

I hear it all the time: 'What happened to the Grace Potter who didn't used to wear makeup?'

Because I never attended elementary schools of any kind, I missed most of the books that were popular with other kids my age. There was an exception, however, which was 'Harry Potter.' My grandmother gave me the first book when I was about 13, and I read it, then read all the rest.

I read so much Harry Potter, that's, like, all I wanted to talk about. I watched stuff like 'Lizzie McGuire.' I watched things that were very mainstream but white, and I went to a predominately white school.

I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.

None of my friends go to places like Selfridges. I'm a regular at the pound shop!

I was always the 250 pound guy that I was when I was 18 years old coming out of high school.

I'm secretly like 800 pounds and 90 years old.

One thing that did give me pause for thought, when I told my female friends now that I was writing about a 13-year-old girl, without exception they all said, 'I would not go back to being 13 for a million pounds.'

Most people think I'm from New York or something. I was, like, 70 pounds heavier than what I am, and I didn't get no girls... I was definitely more on the deep fried crab than I was on the baked chicken side.

I wasn't always 6' 4'' and 400 pounds.