Maysoon Zayid Quotes

I feel liberated being around women who are liberated.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

One of the achievements of our generation of feminists was to emancipate women from the division between being interested in clothes and appearance, and being serious and ambitious. I am of the first generation that could go to Biba, wear miniskirts and get a degree.

My mum is a rock star, and I idolise her. She was born in a conservative Muslim family, where the girls were not educated much, and she was required to wear a burkha. She felt repressed but dreamt of driving her own car, walking around in jeans and wearing sunglasses, and she did.

Whether I'm in a sari or a mini skirt hardly matters as long as the role I do in a film is substantial and makes a difference.

I'm a woman, so I'm going to be woman as much as I can.

I want to be in the small percentage of women who don't settle for conventional roles.

But when I think of superchicks, I think of the roles, not the variety.

People want to put women in one box, and I'm interested in how women can be everything at once.

I do fairly represent Middle Eastern women.

People get really scared when women reclaim words, talk about themselves honestly and also make jokes because it's a really unstoppable combination.

It's hard to tell how far women's individuality has come in the past twenty years.

I'm a child of the Women's Movement. I always believed that I could do anything. That women didn't have to be limited in any way.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

I don't do what I do to try and break a glass ceiling.

I don't know why women feel an affinity with me.

Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.

We are tired of having a 'sphere' doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is 'unwomanly'. We want to be natural just for a change … we must be ourselves at all risks.

I think women want freedom. They want to be empowered. They want hope. They want love; they want all the things that I want, and I'm not afraid to say those things and act on them, and I think that's why they identify with me.

During the era when women were burning their bras - which, by the way, they never actually did - but when women were first becoming liberated, I was 23. And I met a woman who asked, 'Don't you feel bad because you're sort of acting like the stupid airhead blonde?' And I totally surprised myself. I said, 'Liberation can also come from the inside.'

The ideal feminist world shouldn't be one where women suppress their human instincts for attention and desire. We shouldn't be weighed down with the responsibility of explaining our every move. We shouldn't have to apologize for wanting attention, either. We don't owe anyone an explanation.

Women feel empowered when they can do the things that are supposed to be only for men, you know? It breaks boundaries, it's liberating, and it's empowering when you feel like, 'Well, I can do that, too.'

Nobody likes being told who or what they are.

Apparently, I hear from people I always play strong women. I don't see them that way.

My goal is to send a message to Muslim women and young women everywhere that it's okay to break stereotypes and be yourself.