Peter Tosh Quotes

My mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn't stick around too long who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn't have his blood.

Don't forget, you are the hero of your own story.

I consider myself straight, but if I met a guy tomorrow and fell in love with him, would I be brave enough to accept that without having to change the way I look at myself?

What's it like to figure out you're gay and then begin the process of coming out? Well, for most of my life, I felt doomed. I could imagine no path that would allow me to realize my authentic self. I felt the need to lie, even to myself, insisting: I am straight.

If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

I still haven't made a film that defines who I am.

I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.

I made a crash landing here on Earth on February 14, 1962, in the Shreveport Catholic Charities Home for un-wed mothers. The infamous Bonnie and Clyde lost their lives just miles from where I was born. Like outlaws ourselves, my birth mother and I were on the run from the day she found out I was part of her.

I was an illegitimate, well, I still am an illegitimate child.

When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

We're a nation in search of an identity, but it's quite exciting. I don't regard it as a problem. It's a challenge.

To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.

In some ways, in the U.S. we don't know how to be. I think in a lot of ways America is about liberation and about change and progressive human relations. And because of that, I feel like that we're confused about who we're supposed to be and what it is that's supposed to satisfy us and make us feel fulfilled.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.

I was a gay kid who didn't know I was a gay kid, which was really challenging because you think there is something wrong with you until you understand what it is.

It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree.

I'm very interested in how we take ownership of our own stories and our own lives.

I literally grew up reading the papers about my existence... that I was a love child. To a kid, it doesn't make any difference. I always thought that if somebody can have an extramarital affair, someone can have a child out of wedlock.

I never, ever anticipated I would be a 46-year-old man impersonating Cher.

I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I didn't really have the personal agency to express it.

I can't speak for everybody, and I don't want to say it for an entire culture, but for me, coming from an immigrant family, it's very difficult to go find your voice, which requires a lot of failure.

In my early 20s, I set out to kind of find myself. At that time, if you were different or if you ever questioned your gender identity or sexual orientation, society kind of put you in the gay club.