Gene Luen Yang Quotes

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as well. And so, as I sort of been away from writing about identity, I still feel that kind of tug of roots and, you know, cultural background.

I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.

I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to put that out there so blatantly, so that before you listen to me you know that I'm Asian. But I thought it was sort of cool to embrace the Korean half of me, which I love.

I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.

Everything I write is about me.

I do not want to play a character who is exactly like me.

I don't want to be a race-transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African- American, as a Christian, all that I am.

I can honestly say I've never thought for a second about whether a character reflects poorly on any group. All that matters to me is that the character is true to my belief in who he or she is.

Somehow, I realized I could write books about black characters who reflected my own experiences or otherworldly experiences - not just stories of history, poverty and oppression.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

Writing about identity can be like maneuvering through a minefield, even when considering contemporary figures who have discussed the subject themselves.

When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it's going to come out differently, and it will speak in beats of their own generation.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

I grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn't telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I'm so glad that it's changing.

I think most Americans, when we're building a character, we look at the specificity of what that person is, in particular.

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

I was born Chinese, and I write in Chinese. I don't think there's any need to evade this... to a writer, as to a person, what matters is not his political label or his nationality, but whether he is a person and whether his work is worth looking at.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

I don't consider myself an Iranian comedian; I consider myself a comedian who happens to be of Iranian descent.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.

As long as I'm making something from my voice, from my perspective there will be Asian American content because I am the storyteller.