Chief Bender Quotes

I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.

What most people do is try to find a comfortable persona that they're in alignment with and the public likes and appreciates them for.

When you talk about me as a fighter, I like being known as a Mexican fighter. I think 'Mexican' or 'Hispanic' should be mentioned.

My work is often a therapy for myself - a working out of these issues as a black woman. And a way of allowing other black women to work through this kind of stigmatization as they look through the images and feel how distorted or contorted they might be in the public eye.

I want to represent my color and ethnicity. To be proud of our heritages is really cool.

I feel like I'm a designer, not a pop star. But if certain people think of me like a pop star, then the only thing I could do about this is dye my hair black and cut it short maybe.

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.

I don't want to be doing fashion shoots and being interviewed about where I shop. Who cares?

I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.

I feel like I've started to create my own culture of being a voice for something, and that's what people want to know about. I love that because I am a woman and because I a rap, and I look the way I look, I can connect with the demographic of people who feel like they have a voice in me.

I'm trying to protect what I advertise. That's my stance on any kind of self-expression.

People don't need to necessarily see me in the jersey to understand who I am and what message I'm trying to get across with the things that I'm marketing.

People think they know who I am, because I've played so many very, very out gay men on stage, and they think that's me.

I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live. Unfortunately, its not the way the music business works. If you don't create some kind of public image, it gets created for you.

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

I like to consider myself an actor who just happens to be Hispanic.

I'm an actor, full stop. Not an Arab actor. Not an actor of Algerian origin. Just an actor.

I think with most all of us, we want control of our image - it's part of the work that we do.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

I would like people to know me for who I am, especially since I think people have a very skewed image of me. I was playing a lot of cute characters, a lot of little girls; I was objectified. And I don't want people to think of me as that because it's not who I am, and because I've seen a lot of hostility towards that image.

Cultural background surely plays a part in shaping identity; but it does not determine identity.

When I was in politics, I always got accused of image-making and trying to make them something they weren't. Truth was - and nobody ever discovered it, although I was in that business for twenty years - what I was trying to do was to get them to be themselves.

When you have the chance to present yourself vocally, you realize a kind of brand develops around that vocal, and you start to see the public consciousness of you is only about one half of your brain.

There are a lot of people who don't know me and what I am all about.

I don't consider myself an Iranian comedian; I consider myself a comedian who happens to be of Iranian descent.