Simon Schama Quotes

I'd like it if people thought I was Jewish looking.

The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.

I just think that people take me a little more seriously as a brunette. I don't know if that's just because of a societal preconceived notion that all blondes are stupid, but it's a different kind of attitude.

Well, for someone who looks like me you wonder where Alfred Hitchcock is.

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

I've always felt I had to prove myself, and now it has become second nature. When I first went to university, I took lodgings with a woman who said, 'What are the chances of you staining my pans?' I said, 'I don't think I understand the question...' and she said, 'When you cook your curries.'

Being a Chicano in Hollywood, my experience is that you're not given credit for any sophistication... You're just kind of some guy that just crossed the border, you know, on the back of a truck and that's it.

To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on.

Just because we have exotic last names or darker faces, our politics are assumed to be radical. But that is simply not the case.

People have such an immediate judgment of me because I have tattoos or because my hair is sometimes crazy.

I actually spoke to one of the heads of a studio, and he said I confuse middle America. Basically, when they see a black person, they see athlete, they see rapper, or they see criminal or something like that. And then when they hear a British accent, they hear posh, so they hear lawyer or doctor.

I'm Asian, so they assumed I'm not an American and that I come from Japan. Restaurants would refuse to serve me, and places would refuse to give you a haircut.

You can't argue that hip-hop rots away the moral character of kids or rots their brain and still see middle-class white kids going to college who are listening to hip-hop. Going on to become healthy adults listening to hip-hop.

There are definitely advantages to not looking like a Viking in real life.

When people meet me in person, they're usually surprised at how petite I am because there's this idea that because I'm black, I just look a certain way.

When white people wear baggy clothing and speak gibberish they're homeless, when black people wear baggy clothing and speak gibberish they're called rappers.

Now that's hard for many people to believe, given that the media image of a drug dealer is a black kid standing on the street corner with his pants sagging down.

We discovered that in connection with these figures the German national simpletons and money-grubbers of the Frankfurt parliamentary swamp always counted as Germans the Polish Jews as well, although this dirtiest of all races, neither by its jargon nor by its descent, but at most only through its lust for profit, could have any relation of kinship with Frankfurt.

A greater truth that I think we are faced with on a day-to-day basis as minorities is: We are the color of skin first and people second.

Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino women with blond hair look like hookers to me, no matter how clean or cute they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don't work for me with lighter shades.

Be careful of men who are bald and rich; the arrogance of "rich" usually cancels out the nice of "bald".

It's hard when you look a certain way. I look All-American, sweet, girl-next-door, so naturally those are the parts that are going to land on my doorstep.

And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?

I carry a knife now because I read in a white magazine that all black people carry knives. So I rushed out and bought me one.

I was told that when you hit forty men stop looking at you. It's true, until you slip on a mini-skirt.