Vincent Piazza Quotes

There was that sense that as soon as a Northern Irish person opens their mouth, you go, 'Ah, terrorist,' so I refused to do TV and film. Instead, I did theatre for 20 years.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.

The notion that Jews are mythic creatures is well circulating in our culture.

I think the whole stigma of 'black movies' is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like '12 Years A Slave,' to 'The Butler,' to 'The Best Man,' to 'Ride Along,' to even 'Think Like a Man' from last year - these movies are just good movies.

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.

It's really rare that you come across a Southern character that's not stereotyped, vilified or aggrandized.

In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra.

The hardest thing about living in Canberra is that almost everyone who doesn't live here asks: 'Why on earth would you live in Canberra?' Loudly, and in a way they would never use to discuss anywhere else. And they never listen to the answer.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't move the story forward. It just kind of cryogenically freezes us in this old racial paradigm.

The audience will show up if you have authenticity. Like 'Moonlight,' there was stuff in there that is so specific to that community where the filmmakers grew up. Even if I don't understand everything they're talking about, I will love it if I feel that it's real.

I had people who said I was a brilliant producer but I wouldn't get on the news because I was too northern. But there was no way I was changing my accent - it is the key to my identity.

My thing is to get people out of the stigma of what a reggae artist should be like.

There's a stigma attached to being an actor. People from 'Big Brother' call themselves actors. There's so much crap. It's not about appreciating that we're here to service the public, that we're storytellers. It doesn't sit comfortably with me.

Isn't it wrong to target and brand an entire state in a poor light?

I grew up in Manhattan. For Manhattanites, Brooklyn was the sticks, a second-rate civilization. My friends and I, we were so snobby. Living in the Bronx or Brooklyn was incredible... for me, that was like a foreign country.

There's more to Gujarati cinema than characters wearing kediya and ghagra choli and saying 'Aa ra ra ra.'

The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.

I come from the south, so you're useless and you're a bit pathetic. That's the first thing that the northerners think of you.

It is all too easy to draw conclusions and make sweeping judgments about millions of Muslim women based on fleeting television images. That is not right.

All we ever got in those [early] days was "Where are you from? Liverpool? You'll have to be in London before you can do it. Nobody's ever done it from Liverpool.

When youre touring and the minute you tell someone that youre from Jersey its the equivalent of telling them you just got out of jail.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

You could perhaps better tell the story of a place by writing of a tiny village as a sort of prism into the bigger issues the culture was facing. It struck me as a better way to learn about a place, or at least a different way, than just going to interview the president. So I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there. But I'm just amazed.

If you give anybody the chance, they can always make a decent human being out of themselves. It's the people that don't have a chance, that we look down at like they're monsters or they're animals or that they want something different than the rest of us.