Michael Crichton Quotes

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they're looting, if you see a white family it says they're looking for food.

Pakistanis are rarely introduced in popular media in any form except as a member of your friendly terrorist cell next door.

These archetypal older women in movies can sometimes make my skin crawl. It's about the one dimension; it's about the lack of any texture.

When you see a Jamaica video, it's always the hood. Everybody in the video's got guns, and the world looks at it like that's what Jamaica's about. And it affects the economics of the music.

Every single person in the Chicago independent scene said, 'You've got to be a bad guy. You're a Muslim. We're gonna make money. We're gonna call you Sheik Abdullah something. You're gonna wear a turban.'

I think a lot of people have seen me on The Simple Life and think I'm a "spoilt airhead," but I was playing a character. The producers said they wanted Nicole and I just to be crazy and funny and say outlandish things.

What tends to happen in most movies is that strip clubs are used as a short hand for unsympathetic, sleazy people. And that's just a lazy cliché.

I realized that once I graduated from college, there might be a period of time where people might typecast me or be more limiting, and I might not be able to play a crazy character. For me, it was important to do that at least in school.

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

I talked a lot early on in my career about intersectionality and how racism and classism and sexism and homophobia and capitalism are all connected with each other, and they're these crazy systems that are feeding on each other and are also damaging. I can't even go into the whole spectrum of it. But I feel like kids today are so much more savvy about that conversation. And I'm so thrilled when I get to meet younger people who are doing that so much better than I did.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I'm not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcee in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn't eat dairy but smokes menthols, who's always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like, "Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I'll let you wear my mood ring.

I was pretty self-conscious about my body because everybody kept going on like, "Oh, she's so curvy!" and "She's a plus-size model!" and this and that. It's all people would talk about - how I'm not very skinny. For a while, it made me pretty upset and I got a bit obsessive about it. I did a bunch of dieting and exercising and everything. I was losing weight, but I was still much bigger than everybody else. I didn't really see the point of making myself crazy anymore, so I kind of toned it down a little bit.

People have a tendency to cast me more as lawyers and doctors and just rich guys, rich assholes basically, a lot of rich assholes. That's what I'm normally seen as, you know.

Today there are a huge number of think tanks working on poverty-related issues; there are books written on the topic; and university centers being created to study poverty. But, at the same time, the media has a terribly hard time with this issue; it's very hard to convince editors and publishers to devote resources to complex investigations of the lives of America's poor. And, as a result, too often poverty is portrayed in stereotypes, in sound bites, in a few pat images rather than in its full Technicolor complexity and diversity.

Most books and movies that are handed to teenagers are filled with stereotypes.

I didn't want to get stuck in pretty, public school roles, or I knew I'd end up as some sort of caricature.

People have tried to put me in a box my whole life. I'm too tall. I'm too pretty. Too Miss USA. Wonder Woman. Prettiest woman in the world. And all of that. It doesn't matter because I've gone my own way and have tried to approach my career from a gut level, doing what I thought was right.

Man, I don't wanna do what all the other guys do. I don't wanna end up in the booth after the games telling you what I think and talking smack about the guys on the floor when they are a lot better than that. I wanna be different. I don't wanna be known as Commentator Shaq. I wanna be a doctor or something good. I wanna be Dr. Shaq, Officer Shaq, Deputy Shaq.

When you see people say crazy things on our show, they mean this stuff,and that's easy to forget: They're not joking.

When I was listening in on the phone call where Andre Leon Talley was saying that he was going to get my fat, black ass on the cover of a magazine. I think that - you know, Andre Leon Talley is fat and black. And it hurt my feelings. It hurt my feelings. But it also was a lesson in this is what they think, and this is what they will always think. And there's no way of being too talented or too pretty or too confident around it. People will still have their opinions.

I mean, but obviously, in people's eyes, it still - it can still link Islam to terrorism. I mean, why does it make a difference that they're white?

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

I don't think I've ever tried to be something that I'm not. People do that for you. People try to pigeonhole you. People tried typecasting me, before they even saw me in anything else. I've never understood that. I was like, "Why don't you wait until my next project, before you start telling my what my career is going to look like, for the next 10 years?" I've never let it set me back because I always knew the world would try to do that for me, anyway.

I think it's kind of crazy that we're still calling comedians "female comedians." That seems more like a sneak attack.