Identity Discovery Quotes

The journey toward self-discovery is life's greatest adventure.

When you study our greatest artists, you will find that they give us a key to understand how to deal with each other, and that our bloodlines are intertwined. It's not hyphenated America. That there is an America, and it is expressed in those arts. It gives us a key to figure out how to negotiate with each other, and it tells us actually who we are.

I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.

I didn't know I was Jewish until I encountered anti-Semitism at the age of 10, when my best friend told me I couldn't come to their house because I was a Jew.

When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.

I don't know that I had context for being trans until I moved to Rochester, New York, to pursue my dream of acting, and started going to drag shows. I had never seen a transsexual before, and I didn't yet fully understand my own identity.

Hermione is so close to who I am as a person that I've never really had to research a role. I'm literally rediscovering what it means to be an actress.

Lots of women don't realize that they're gay until they're grown up.

I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.

Writing is my therapy. In addition to my real therapy. God knows where I'd be without it. I'd probably still be at my last job, working in HR at a religious organization. I was horribly miscast.

I realized I was gay when I was a teenager and I couldn't imagine what it meant to be a gay adult. I just did the next thing that seemed right, and that led me from activism to media to the kind of media I'm in now. But I like where I've ended up.

I didn't really know what I was until I came to America and I had sex [for the first time] in San Francisco in 1970. It was with someone of my own sex.

It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.

For me, it's a voyage of self-discovery. I'm able to go on a set and to explore situations, personalities, people and characters that are close to me, or maybe not. Through going there and experiencing these different people and their situations, it helps me to get oriented and develop as a human being. So, acting is fundamental to who I am.

I first started removing the 'she,' 'her,' and 'hers' pronouns from my online material. I was just using my name in place of a pronoun, and that felt really good. Then I read the script for 'Billions' and did a little more research into non-binary, and it just really clicked for me.

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something

I couldn't wait to look at someone who shared my genes. I thought my baby was going to provide a decoder key to my past. But then I looked at Pippa and realized, no, she's actually the key to my future.

I have seen without perceiving I have been another man Let me pierce the realm of glamour So I know just what I am.

Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave information on the finished lesbian--and that woefully sketchy--but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing. I did discover that the difference between hermaphrodites and lesbians was that hermaphrodites were "born that way." It was impossible to determine whether lesbians budded gradually, or burst into being with a suddenness that dismayed them as much as it repelled society.

I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was White. Later I found out that she wasn't, and she was actually very much in-tune with her Blackness.

I didn't know what gay was until I lived in New York for 10 years. You know, I was just underexposed in that regard.

I'm the kind of actor who has ventured into escaping from me.

I had been virtually a Unitarian (as I still am) but without knowing it. The experience of being among Unitarians who did know what they were, and attached much importance to it, was entirely novel to me, but I soon fell into their ways and found it easy to go forward on their road, the more so because the other roads became closed to me.

When I was writing the book, I thought "Who wants to hear another story about some actor who lost his way?" But my story is a little unique in that I realized when I was 14 years old that I was different. I think a lot of gay people use drugs and alcohol to quell that fear and shame - especially people of my age.

I was like, 'Oh, my God, girls are so pretty and soft. No stubble burn! What am I doing with guys?' [I] haven't dipped back since, but I was very appreciative of the experience.