I know exactly where I've come from, I know exactly who my mum and dad are.
I was born in Colorado and grew up in Pennsylvania with family in Texas and Oklahoma.
I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins.
It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.
Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.
I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.
It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto but every time I go back, I'm seeing the same things that I lived. That's one of the things I mean when I say, "My feet back onto the ground."
I was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 6, 1943, one year to the day before D-Day, the allied invasion at Normandy. The youngest of four children, I was brought up in a wonderfully stable, loving family of strong Midwestern values.
The very first idea I ever had about making a film... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd because at that age that's a stupidly ridiculous idea 'cause how will I ever be a filmmaker.
My father brought me my first stack of comics, when I was seven years old and in the hospital. I was not a well child. And that's where my love for comics began.
We could've done this anywhere, but I wanted you to see me, to see this," he said, gesturing at the room. "I wanted you to know where I come from, what I am under the choices I make.
I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L.A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.
A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.
I think all of the secrets of the universe are revealed in history. We understand who we are by understanding where we've been and why we are the way we are, and where we come from.
I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.
Growing up in Denver, I'm sure it started with loving the Colorado mountains.
I think it's important to be extremely proud of one's origins, especially when you are a foreign actress with ethnic features.
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
I went to Norman High then I walked across the street after that and went to college. That's my home town, that's where I'm from. Physically I'm a Texan, but I'm an Oklahoman.
