David Levithan Quotes

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

With every character, I just bring something that I can make my own.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

The girl next door isn't necessarily blonde and blue-eyed anymore. So I don't feel like I need to morph into that all-American thing.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

Pink is not a color - it's a culture to me.

My production company, what we are trying to do is I'm trying to create content that speaks to me, and it's not one color. It's not one size fits all.

I did not want to be the gay artist, and I talked to my manager all the time, like, I don't want to lead with that. I didn't want people to look at me like that's all I am.

Being a young actor in the industry, I had a lot of people who strongly advised me to stay quiet. That was hard to live with. But I've never played a gay role before, and I didn't want to be limited by some strange perception.

That's the biggest thing I struggle with. We could never hope to represent every gay person in America. There will be people who will say, 'Well, my experience of being gay isn't like that,' to which I can only say, 'That's fine.'

I don't feel like I'm writing music for gay people. I'm a gay man who is writing music about one tiny little experience of what it's like to be a human on this planet.

What I've noticed about Hollywood is, if you go out there shouting about who you are, they will love you for it. But if you go out not knowing what it is that you're representing, and you are just a canvas, they will make you into the thing they need you to be.

I am a woman, and I am Jewish; I'm a film-maker, and I'm a writer, so you cannot just put me in one box.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

I think there is a lot of space for people to love who they love, and a lot of space for actors to carve a niche for themselves.

I am a black British female artist, so I must be like Ms Dynamite, I must be like Shystie, I must be like Jamelia, but we're all different.

I take the responsibility of playing another ethnicity very, very seriously, and I promise myself and those people that I will represent them with as much dignity and integrity as I can muster.

No one was creating and I always wanted to be created on.

Always be original. Never duplicate what you've seen another actor do. Be true to the character that you've been given, and the rest will come easy.

The faces I see in the modeling industry can get dull.

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what's in style, what's current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

Just trying to be different - when I hear something - I don't like to go trampling on other people's sounds.

I sense a kind of fear of writing black or Asian characters from non-ethnic writers, who perhaps feel that they don't know the culture and therefore can't write about it. By and large, if there's an Asian character, I might get a call. But if the character is called 'Philip,' the chances are I won't.

So it's not so much that I set out to do something different, it's just that the songs themselves require their own individual voice and attention.

Rock is about finding who you are. You don't necessarily have to play your instrument very well at all. You can just barely get by and you can be in a rock band.