Wale Quotes

The reality that everyone is stereotyped - every one gets typecast, so you have to work to get out of that.

A lot of people get stereotyped into roles just from how they look, and I have played such a variety of characters.

It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain opinions. I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.

I've run into people who say, 'I know what you're like: You're a Boston guy.' That's so weird. This person who doesn't know anything about me thinks they know a lot because of the city I grew up in, which, to me, is a meaningless label. There are all kinds of people from Boston.

People look at me, they know I've appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person.

I don't believe in stereotypes. Most of the time, stereotypes are just that.

I refuse to be stereotyped.

I think I underestimated the way people bracket you.

People want to typecast you; it's human nature.

I think I'm going to be stereotyped forever, but I'm not scared of being stereotyped.

People decided that I was the frat guy, even though I've never been inside a fraternity, or the guy who beat them up at school, even though that wasn't me at all.

Beware, as long as you live, of judging people by appearances.

We've got these stereotypes, and I think there can be some trouble when we force these on people.

Putting labels on entire groups of people makes things much simpler. If all New Yorkers are pushy, or all politicians are dishonest, we don't have to do the hard work of figuring out who's who.

People are quick to pigeonhole you.

Assuming audiences to be dumb, that's a big fallacy.

People always put you in a box as a rapper, especially when I get up on a panel and start speaking, and I start speaking when I got some sense. They're like, 'Oh, well, I didn't expect him to have sense.'

The trouble is that people are all too ready to jump to conclusions about anybody who they think looks a bit strange. They think you must be mentally subnormal.

People will put me in whatever box they feel the most comfortable having me in, and nothing I can do will change that.

When you come into this league, everyone tries to put you in categories - 'this is what he is' or 'this is what he can do.'

I haven't ever been stereotyped or pigeonholed or put into a box.

People didn't know who I was or why I was there, so they started inventing stories about me. I was a registered sex offender and I'd just been released from prison and was being forced to do community-service work. I was a murderer, an arsonist - all these horrific things had been projected on me because no one knew what to make of this white guy who showed up and made toast at 5 o'clock every morning.

We all get pigeon-holed or put in a box, no matter what that might be.

When you're starting out as an actor people are very interested in who you are because they want to know where they can put you. And quite often, and we're all guilty of this is our lives, we judge very quickly and we pigeon-hole people very quickly based on how they look and how they talk and how they dress and we think: "Oh yeah, we know who you are."

People have a preconceived notion about who I am and it's interesting. It's like picking who you want to win for the Oscars and not seeing the movie.