Jesmyn Ward Quotes

People are making a lot more noise about representation and diversity. But I think modeling is one of the professions where people can be kind of racist.

Like one of any minority, I have experienced prejudice.

I was too Jewish for 'Flashdance.'

Sometimes, the hate that I endure is not necessarily about me but about the space I'm in.

I was the first black director on 'Dallas.' I drove my car into the studio lot and the guard asked me who I was delivering to.

When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.

A guy can try something and not be successful, and it's just about him. But when you're a person of color, when you're a woman, when you're a woman of color in particular, you mess it up, and other people get tarred by your decision-making. You never act alone.

There are stories I wanted to tell, and they are not defined by what I look like.

When you walk into a room, and you're the only one of something - the only woman or the only African American - that immediate feeling of loneliness happens.

SXSW can feel very male, very straight, and very white, and though it's a great festival, when you have a film that's different, it's hard to find your place.

The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.

For me, personally, I didn't see many people like me on TV growing up.

The fundamental thing that makes the 'X-Men' different from every other series out there is it's all about prejudice. It's about a group of young people trying to make a place in a society that doesn't want them.

I don't write the same book twice.

There aren't a lot of roles for sleepy-eyed black dudes.

If you never, or rarely, see your experience depicted in art or pop culture then you can begin to feel isolated or separate; Othered. So, representation is super important.

At some point along the way, I stopped being a writer, and I became a black writer. I never used to be a black writer. I used to write 'Spider-Man,' 'Green Lantern,' whatever was lying around. 'Thor,' 'Hulk,' whatever. Now, if the phone rings or when the phone rings, it's almost exclusively some project that has something to do with my ethnicity.

I spent 12 years of my life writing stories without black people. That's insane to me. It's insane that I could have believed in magical portals and dragons and all that stuff, but to believe a black person could be experiencing those things was unimaginable.

I knew nothing of American History because I didn't pay attention to American History in school. Because I did not see myself in American History in school.

I kind of understood inherently - and I wasn't really conflicted about this - that comics were not for me or by people who looked like me. That was just something that I accepted about the world.

As an ethnic female in wrestling, there will be people reading my words and I want to set an example. I did experience racism.

I think it's so important to have visibility and to break down stereotypes and stigmas and everything that people are so attached to.

Demonization of people on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, or other criteria leads to dehumanization. The notion that some are 'other' is a dangerous and slippery slope.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?

It's hard to accept yourself when you live in a world where nobody is like you, or you feel like nobody is like you because there's no representation.