Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

I had no words for these feelings. And then people started using the word Ms. Suddenly, there was this handle with which I could identify myself and understand why I felt so out of whack with the culture around me.

I've tried to write from my own understanding of identity in all my comics, whether it's about superheroes or historical conflicts or monkey gods.

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

Writing about identity can be like maneuvering through a minefield, even when considering contemporary figures who have discussed the subject themselves.

Cultural background surely plays a part in shaping identity; but it does not determine identity.

I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

All I've ever done since I was 17 is tell stories. You know, I'm a storyteller. And that's what I'm going to keep on doing, especially now, kind of embracing and making sure that we tell immigration.

I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.

If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the time.

I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers.

I'm very proud of my roots, and I would never try not to be who I am.

I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.

I think it is important to maintain your personality, your roots, very important.

My name, my real name, is Tracy. I always thought I was like a boy named Sue. So I made my friends call me 'Tray.'

Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.'

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.