Identity Influence Quotes

I don't know if I would have the same take on world matters and social issues if I were not gay.

I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.

As a person who doesn't identify as straight, any love song I write is contextualized by a queer identity.

You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.

I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren't neutral.

There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.

I think my imagination about jobs was pretty limited. There were so few jobs that I actually saw people who looked like me in, that I imagined myself in, that I think I just stopped imagining.

I am not a practising Jew, and I am not embedded in Nigerian culture, but I have a sense of those things inside me, which is very handy for acting. There are a lot of things I can draw on.