Alex Tizon Quotes

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.

Accents are very sexy. American girls who speak French are very attractive to a Frenchman. Anything exotic or different is attractive.

I don't see myself as exotic.

When I'm in the Switzerland backcountry and nobody around looks like me, people were like, 'Can I touch your hair?'

I'm drawn to people who look different. I'm not exploiting. I'm not making fun of them. I'm drawn to them.

I myself am mixed race - my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew - so I've always felt other.

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.

I try so hard not to think that I am a stranger in a strange land. But I know that I stand out.

People in New York are surprised when I open my mouth.

Americans are as they are. We have to accept this. Lots of Europeans forget that.

Some people have a desire to be with the same sex. But that's them.

Foreigners are not like the people I am used to here.

Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.

For the Americans, it is not attractive to hear what the similarities are between them and the Iranian people. It is attractive to hear how different the Iranians are.

If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.

Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.

In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my 'ancient,' 'beautiful' origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.

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.'

Everything about me was different.

If we can look at another human being and categorise them as 'illegal,' or that chilling American word 'alien,' then what has become of our own humanity?

I would trade 20 white babies for an Asian baby. If I'm ever rich, I want a closet full of Asian babies. And I'll just pull them out whenever I'm feeling down, you know? All kinds. Korean ones. Chinese ones. Vietnamese - not so much. My dad was in the war, and I hold a grudge.

Kids used to say stuff all the time about how I was different.

But being Asian American, a lot of Asian American guys come up to me who are in interracial relationships and they tell me, 'Growing up my partner had a big crush on you and so you're probably one of the reasons why she married me, so thank you.'

I am conscious of the community that I'm representing and don't play into stereotypes.