Adrian Tomine Quotes

Action roles - or any role - should go to the best guy for the job. People obsess about nationality. Hollywood and America might be the hub for pop culture and cinema for the Western world, but that shouldn't suggest that all the roles should go to young American men.

I think it is the weak and the young and the minorities that you need to look after to get a healthy creative environment - to get a lot of choices, a lot of different styles of music, a lot experimental stuff that everyone else feeds off.

There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.

The box office has become global. I think that factors in to the question of how to portray different ethnicities and cultures.

America is grappling with cultural diversity, and I just want to put a show on that represents the world in which I live.

I want to be able to work on a project that will give people around the world the chance to represent their own people, their own culture, their own stories, rather than just Hollywood - really, you know, dominated Hollywood. And that's a dream of mine.

The most important thing to keep in mind is the incredible diversity of talent that's out there - there are so many great actors from all over Asia, from Singapore and Hong Kong to the Philippines and Mainland China, not to mention many great Asian-American actors who are eager for fun and challenging roles.

I can represent my culture while helping not only the Chinese-American community, but also the community at large.

I think why my content does so well with so many different types of people is because it speaks to everyone. I'll make a Soca music reference, I'll use a Tamil word, I'll do a Jamaican Patois accent. I know about all these people, and I'm not afraid to indulge in their culture.

As an Asian actor, I would like once in my life to do just one Hollywood movie. It would be a memorable experience.

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka.

I love getting on the subway because you get on the car, and you see the entire human race represented in any given subway car.

By the time we're adults, our ideas have solidified. So I wanted to write for a younger audience, who would perhaps love heroes from other cultures.

I used to teach animation history classes at the University of Texas, and I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons. I just love cartoons.

Pot lucks are fun, especially when you encourage your guests to bring dishes that represent their families or cultures.

There are very few people who are Asian who have the kind of global reach that I have, not just with Asians but with non-Asians. I've worked hard for what my name represents, my brand, not just in Britain but around the world.

Many theaters are tackling the multifaceted work of black writers - established and emerging. Now the next step is for them to bring in audiences of color and continue to go out to our community and create a continuous connection that extends beyond the one black show in the season.

We have to stop thinking about diversity and start thinking about inclusion. That's what you can take from August Wilson. That there are whole cultures out there living experiences exactly like yours, and their stories can be just as dynamic, sold in the foreign market, put as many butts in the seats as any Caucasian movie out there.

My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.

People look to 'Dear White People' as an encyclopedia of our culture. But it's also art, and there are characters with different perspectives.

If the writers all come from the same backgrounds, you are going to get the same sorts of characters. Get a broader variety of writers, and you get a bigger range of stories.

The multiculturalism of Britain is one of our greatest strengths in music, literature, and visual art, but the TV and film industry doesn't tap into the multicultural talent pool in the U.K. as much as they do in the U.S.

Making a movie with people of all different ethnicity, all different skin color and different backgrounds, meant that the movie can literally play all around the world. It's not just a blanket whitewash film like most Hollywood films tend to be.

It's time for storytellers to tell the stories that have not had the privilege of being shown to the world, and the audience will be there.

The Chinese Student Association at Cornell put together their own play. It was all Asian people in the cast except for me, because they wanted to do a couple of scenes about an interracial relationship. I was the only non-Asian person on stage; the entire audience was Asian apart from my 10 friends that showed up.