Issa Rae Quotes

That's what was so amazing about 'Mulan.' Here is this story with all Chinese characters, and yet so many people related to her character and loved the story. So I really think as long as you have a good story that relates to a lot of people, it doesn't matter what ethnicity it is.

I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

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.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

Even though everybody's lives are different, in general we're all human beings, and we go through the same things: disappointments, the pleasures of life, life and death. That's always been a really big part of the show to me, making sure the audience feels connected, and that carries through to the album.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

I'm very proud to be black, but I'm just as much black as I am white. But I want tell stories that everybody can relate to, so I don't care who's opposite me.

My problems aren't so different from anybody else.

I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.

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 am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

In the case of 'Everything I Never Told You,' my goal was to make the experiences of a family that had always felt marginalised feel accessible and understandable even to people who'd never been in that situation.

No matter where you come from, we all share the same struggles as human beings, and my beginning is no different.

We love stories about identity and acceptance because they're so universal.

It's just about feelings. And the thing is we - everybody lives exactly the same things. We are all humans, even if you speak Spanish or whatever you speak. That's just - we are humans, and that's really interesting. And I'm sure that we can understand each other even if you don't understand my language.

I'm a Mexican girl from California, and I never grew up thinking I could be in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. I didn't really see myself in that. Not that I didn't grow up loving Rodgers and Hammerstein, but I don't know - I just never put myself there.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

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.

I feel my situation is no different from anybody else's experiences.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first one who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.

I know that sounds cliché, but mostly from my own experiences and things I see around me. We're all human beings, and a lot of the things I write about are pretty universal things.

There's always to me a universality - one of the things I learned early on as a journalist and a writer is that there's a universality in specifics. The more specific you get, the more universal it can be.

I have the ordinary experience of having the blender bottom come off in my room upstairs. I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences. What's important is to be able to see yourself, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.