Adrian Anthony Gill Quotes

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

In fashion, there are so many gangs, if you identify too much with one, you get caught - I would lose my freedom.

I may look like an American WASPy doctor or lawyer, but I feel just like Woody Allen. Don't cast me for my looks - I have a very ironic, existential, crazy Jew in me.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

I am different than some people would like me to be. I just don't buy into that the personal can be political.

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

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

I've always wrestled against being typified in one way or another.

White America don't get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other.

I think great comedy comes from the oppressed. It comes from feeling like you've gotten punched up in a way.

When you're part of a society where you're constantly having to define your identity and sort of negotiate with what the mainstream culture thinks you are, you have less energy and time to figure out who you are when you go home at night.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

Being the free woman who is sexy and out there is a performance in a way, and being the stay-at-home mom and wife is a performance in itself. All of those performances are living and force you to make decisions about who you really are. Women have to put those performances ahead of things sometimes. Men aren't perceived in the same way.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

My only criticism about Quentin Crisp is that the subversive must be ready to subvert themselves. I may dress for myself, but I undress for everybody else, whereas he never did that - he was never prepared to drop a bomb on everything he did.

Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.

I've learned to have absolutely no regrets about any jokes I've ever done.

I'm more than just a piece in their Games.

Stand-up is great because I can get everything off my chest.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.