Boots Riley Quotes

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

One of my problems is to find the self.

We have many identities, and we can't be authentic to them all. The best we can do is be sincere in our efforts to earn the values we claim.

When I looked at 'Dear White People,' you have four African-American students who are all very different and who are trying to figure out who they are. They're dealing with identity issues and crises. That is exciting to me, to see African-American young people on a page, on a screen, who are so diverse and whose stories are all so different.

I don't know that I constantly think about being a black woman.

Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.

I am nothing but I must be everything.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.

Everyone goes through that time in their life when they're trying to figure out who they are, find their own purpose and their own way.

As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.

I see how people look at me, all around the world. They see something because of the race I belong to. I have to understand that and put it into my music.

How strange it is to be anything at all.

As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

What are we taking from people and what do we give is a life-long struggle, I think, for most of us. Who are we? Do we like who we are? Do we know who we are? Do we care? Does anyone care? That's such a big topic. I could tackle that in many movies. So could other people.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?