Jonathan Lethem Quotes

To be with the others, you have to have your hair short and wear ties. So we're trying to make a third world happen, you know what I mean?

I grew up in a small town where everyone wanted to be the same or look the same and was afraid to be different.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

It's an important point to make that people can't just be invalidated, eradicated, because they don't fit tidily into a box. And more and more, the modern world is all about conformity.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

It's very cliched to go, 'You're not punk.' We don't care if we are, and we don't care if we aren't.

You know, you don't have to look like everybody else to be acceptable and to feel acceptable.

'Divergent' is a story about people who don't fit into a category - that is a big part of the message - but it's also about conformity and forcing people into these simple archetypes. At the end of the day, humans don't exist like that. We're multifaceted.

I dyed my hair about 42 different colours, and kids can be pretty judgmental about people who are different. But instead of breaking down and conforming, I stood firm. That is also probably why I was unhappy.

It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.

There's part of our culture where uniqueness is celebrated and appreciated and another part of our culture where this one way to be - one color hair, one sized breasts, one kind of nose - that's also front and center.

If I don't belong because of what I think and because of my opinions, then so be it. What can one do about it? One can't bend over backwards or pretend to be someone else just to belong. And in any case, it doesn't work. Once you no longer belong, it's over.

Colombian culture has had a huge influence on me and taught me a different way of looking at things - I was always different from the people I went to school with, and I learned to embrace that.

People don't want to be diverse, or they're scared to be diverse. People just dress a certain way to fit in but sometimes being outside of the box is the cool thing to do.

I was the black kid in school who'd skate and wrestle, who was really into outer space and botany and kung fu and hip-hop. I was into everything.

I thought for a very long time that I had to conform or maybe change the way I look, or maybe the hijab was dimming my beauty. I took a moment, and then I realized, you know what, there's a lot of girls who do wear this, and this is their reality. It just made me even more prouder to wear it.

I'm not the standard Asian girl.

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states . Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

Call it stubborn, call it ignorant, call it what you want, but I don't think I have to join a particular faith or culture or creed or religion just to fit in.

I've always liked to go down a different path. Being a woman of color, I never followed a cookie cutter way.

There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don’t fit the stereotype yet.

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

We are addicted to being the way we are

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most. His very "uniqueness," "separateness" and "differentiation" make him an alien, not only in his native place, but even in his own home. Often more so than the foreign born who generally falls in with the established.