Joel Grey Quotes

My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren't Jewish.

I'm proud of who I am, and I'm proud I grew up in Puerto Rico.

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

Hey, I may loathe myself, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm Jewish.

Whatever your ethnicity is, in this life you are going to be on a journey to discover who you are and how you feel about yourself.

I think, for me, it has been important to remain 'Petra from Fulnek.'

Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.

I mean, a Mexican boy couldn't be anything else but an Indian. And why did you take the name of Quinn, they used to say to me. Hey, you're an Indian, so I played Indians.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to put that out there so blatantly, so that before you listen to me you know that I'm Asian. But I thought it was sort of cool to embrace the Korean half of me, which I love.

People always think I'm Jewish and changed my last name from Rabinowitz.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

I am Chinese - it doesn't matter what other people say.

Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.

Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves.

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

I'm slowly feeling more Chinese and feel I should be more proud of being Chinese and appreciate where I've come from.

I'm Russian Jewish. And I had to grow up really quickly.

Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.

I think the Lower East Side inspires me. That whole neighborhood, a lot of the people that I worked with, seeing what we've gone through in life, being given an opportunity to understand who I am; my identity, my culture, and my roots.

I'm a chava, a young one.

I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?