John Boyne Quotes

I don't want to be just that transgender performer or that transgender musical artist. I want to create songs and art and have those be judged on their merit alone.

It's pretty hard as an Asian rapper to not be put in a box. I do my best to avoid that.

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

I don't want to be considered 'the Latino rapper.'

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.

I've never been one to bow down to people who try to question my identity because I don't fit their mould of what an Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be or look like.

I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like 'Midnight in Paris.' Nostalgia isn't so enticing.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

I don't want to be boxed in or looked at a certain way, as in, 'Yo, he's an Asian rapper.'

I think the stakes are always high when you're an artist of color - to get things right, to get things perfect and make everybody happy.

I don't wanna marginalize myself. I don't wanna be the overly woke rapper, and I don't wanna be the turned-up rapper.

I really didn't want to be boxed into becoming a certain kind of film-maker - becoming the Maori story film-maker because I had made those short films.

A police officer asked me why I agreed to play a Pakistani in my films. I told him that someone has to do different, na. If everyone will become Indian army officer then how the story will proceed?

I do not want myself to be restricted to a pigeonholed kind of filmmaker.

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

There is this feeling among black artists that you have to be really careful. We're not inclined to talk about this stuff because, if we do, we put ourselves in a position where we're not marketable or where we can't win.

I'm not here to put my music out on the Internet with no support and then say I got creative freedom. I've got creative freedom wherever I go: I don't create anything that I don't want to create. That's freedom. Since when does a company force you to make something that you don't want to make? If they do that, you leave.

I always say I want creative control. A lot of people don't think about that. And that's what every artist should think of - being creative and not just a puppet.

I can only control what I can, which is what I'm able to do as an artist.

For the first four or five years I was in Korea, I took a lot of direction from my management and label in terms of what people want. I found myself trying to fit into that thing I never felt comfortable with because the critique I got was that I was too American, and too sophisticated and polished in terms of my musicality and it won't sell.

What if Macauley Culkin were black in 'Home Alone?' Most people would write it differently... but I would write it the same way.

Some artists can work under one guise, whether it's a name or a band or doing film soundtracks, put all of their ideas in one pot and move on. Me, I need to compartmentalize.

In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential.

I don't think one should be a slave to one medium.

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?