John Lithgow Quotes

If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the time.

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

The image of Ireland is projected as a male image in the acting world, similar to the way that the word of Ireland is male dominated.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

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

The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences.

'The Princess and the Warrior' is looking at the same things as 'Lola' - just from a different angle.

You can do a hell of a film if you can understand what it is to be a man in America.

There is no 'generic' Latina.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Black people have to define who we are, or others do it for us.

Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.

Maybe we need to start with the rethinking of what is "west" and what is "non-west." It seems to me that there are any number of populations who already cross that divide, and we could probably point to several existing states that belong exclusively neither to one category nor to the other. Do we use these terms to designate geographical realities, geopolitical ones, or perhaps sites of power, exploitation, orientalism that move through space and time in ways that have to be tracked historically.

When someone like me, who is in the entertainment industry, which is a huge falsity of its own, tries to talk outwardly about politics, especially as a woman, I receive a lot of 'Shut up - just sing and dance for us, you idiot.'

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'

While the male wants to conquer the world, the woman has a take on her immediate world that is so sparklingly refreshing that the male cannot even think of it.

I'm conscious of the fact that I'm sort of a bridging figure. I have my Chinese literary heritage and cultural background, so I'm comfortable with these things, but at the same time, I have to navigate the Anglo-American tradition, which has a self-centred view of what Asia and what being Chinese means.

It's rare that you see Latin families being portrayed as intelligent, sophisticated, and powerful entities.

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.

I think Hollywood makes the mistake of mixing all these identities and cultures, mostly from the Middle East.

I don't see much of myself in the traditional Western hero.

It's a funny thing that's happening online. The Middle Easterners want 'Aladdin' to be a Middle Eastern story, and the Indians want 'Aladdin' to be an Indian story. The truth is, it's really a folk tale from the 1800s, and Agrabah is a fictional place that's a culmination of India and Asia and the Middle East.

The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind us that what we believe has always been true - that men and women are somehow static categories, or that men in power has always been the default, or that same-sex love affairs were always taboo - has not always been thus.

Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.