Misty Copeland Quotes

When you grow up as a minority in a majority culture, a lot of times, you're just trying to fit in.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

When I started out, it was rare to see elected representatives with foreign roots. Often, I was relegated to my origins, put in the diversity box: 'You're the new face of diversity.' That annoyed me because I always felt French, and suddenly I was being made to feel I wan't as French as others.

If people are going to complain about stereotyping, it's as likely to be Italian-Americans as gay people.

I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong.

It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy.

OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you. You have a $500 suit on and you're still a lowlife.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

As an individual, and I have to say as a person of color, the thing about being an 'other' in America is I really feel like you're bilingual. I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, but even when I'm in New York and I'm working for MSNBC or CNN, you're used to being the only black person in the room.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

I understand working-class culture, tribalism and the ethos of violence, so I make films about these things.

Great numbers of Asian Americans do not fit the model minority or 'tiger family' stereotypes, living instead in multigenerational poverty far from the mainstream.

On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?

When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

I was kind of a loser at ballet school. It's all rich kids, and I was not a wealthy kid. I didn't have the Chanel butterfly clip everyone else did.

We call it taco politics. They [U. S. Gobvernment officials] come to us, speaking Spanish, offering Hispanic rhetoric. But they're not really getting down to specifics of the problems we have.

The working class is very under-represented in politics, literature, and everywhere else.

… an army of Gatsbys wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust.