Martine Syms Quotes

People identify with me - everyone does - African American women, Caucasian women, they all identify with me because I'm ethnic.

It's very important to me that people get to see themselves in stories. When someone tells me they've never seen themselves, I have a new goal.

I wasn't able to relate to anyone on TV growing up, so I wanted to bring my own experiences to the screen.

I wasn't the only person out there writing about pop culture and race, but I stayed true to my voice, and people felt attracted to that. They said it felt like they were having brunch with their best friend.

There are folks who now know black families - like the Johnsons on 'Black-ish' or the folks on 'Modern Family.' They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.

I think when you look at the diversity of the readership, all the different people who love comics, I want comics to reflect the real world, and I think Marvel does a good job of trying to do that, but I don't think there's ever an end point when it comes to creating diversity and creating stories that people can relate to.

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

While the books I read as a child lacked diversity in the strict sense, they didn't lack values. Reading, I didn't see me externally, but I felt me - my humanity.

When you're trying to inspire individuals across the country, you have to have a reflection that people can see themselves in.

When I saw Neneh Cherry singing on TV, I was so glad that there was someone of the same ethnicity - and with the same curly hair - for me to look up to.

People love to see themselves on screen in a way that makes sense and seems on point.

I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.

Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.

It's funny, because I've never thought of myself as a Hispanic actor, like in 'American Gangster,' I'm playing an Italian. I've always been fortunate enough to have been allowed to play all these diverse roles.

My first job is to entertain, but if, while you're enjoying, you start to question something you never thought about before or empathize with, relate to, love someone you only thought of as 'other' once upon a time - how awesome is that.

An audience is going to be able to find a little bit of Dorothy in themselves and relate to this woman.: roles like Dorothy Day are so rare in Hollywood.

In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story - by the people as a whole - and not by the little things.

I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.

I've tried to be inclusive in my '2B' series. Over the course of three books, I wrote African-American characters, a paraplegic character, gay and lesbian characters, a bisexual, Jewish heroine, a multiracial hero, Korean and Chinese-American characters, and a multiracial supporting character.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

We all know the power of film; we all know there's almost nothing more powerful than to see people on film that look and talk like you, like we do.

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it's specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It's just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We've seen that.

It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.