Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

This sounds like my autobiography, but I thought this would be a good time to sound off about myself, as I think that I have been silent too long about my views and opinions.

But this show reminds me that there are other aspects to me besides the fact that I'm a funny chick.

I have no issues with my identity.

It's easy to forget who you are.

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.

Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.

I've read a lot of different versions of myself - and all of them are true because it's all opinion, and they're as accurate as it can ever be. But I don't think that I've been deft at hiding parts of my personality.

Throughout my life, I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact, confused.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

It's so much easier to know who you are when there aren't a thousand people telling you who they think you are.

What is interesting about me isn't that I am a mother, it is who I am. I love my family, but if I just talk to you about being a mother, it's boring. I am sorry, but it's reducing who I really am, and it's really boring.

I have to live in the truth that this is who I am. That's what I need to focus on.

It is very important to know who you are. To make decisions. To show who you are.

Once you figure out who you are and what you love about yourself, I think it all kinda falls into place.

I think the older you get, the more you know about life, and the more you learn about yourself and you become comfortable in your own skin. So the older I'm getting, the more fun I'm having.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

You want to find out what it is about you or what it is about your past and your lineage that's in you now, and whether you carry those traits and maybe what one's mission is to take it to the next level.

You don't wanna walk around and say, 'I'm somebody's niece, I'm somebody's cousin, I'm somebody's daughter. Who are you?' And I think that's always the challenge when you grow up in a well-known family, is ultimately, you have to face yourself in the mirror and say, 'Who are you? What have you done?'

I developed a sense of self before moving to crazy Hollywood, which was really important.

I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.

I know who I am. When I look in the mirror, I see me.