Miles Davis Quotes

We don't all have to take the same coordinates to get to the same destination. Being a young African American female artist, I want to open doors for young black girls.

If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.

We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.

It's very difficult to be asking other people for opportunities. It is much more empowering to be creating opportunities, to be the one who is saying, 'Look, I'm going to take this from the ground up and create a story that is meaningful to me as an Asian American and cast it with Asian Americans and have Asian Americans writing it.'

I learned about poise and dignity, and I learned about what it means to be an African-American in television and what that requires in terms of what kind of position you take for yourself and how you define your own reality in a world that is still finding its footing, to say the least.

When you're a model, you learn how to make the most of your assets - in my case, the smallish behind that is the legacy of my half-Japanese heritage.

It's so important for women to create images of women - or any group, at that.

I think most people think of ballerinas as kind of either as a fairytale, far-away thing that's really not attainable, something they can't grasp, or they think of them as European or Russian and kind of their nose up in the air. So, it's cool for me to, like, sit with them and for them to really see themselves as me.

I'm working to create a space where it feels easy to include and imagine black girls and make black girls like me the main characters of our lives.

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn't talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.

I write for my people.

Whether you're a woman, a transwoman, a person of color, I feel like Instagram is really important for the creation and framing of the self.

When you have filmmakers like Justin Simien, writers, producers, actresses like Lena Waithe, who are people of color, they're creating their own content and saying, 'You know what? We're not going to wait on someone else to tell our story. We're going to do it ourselves. You can be a part of it or not.'

What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.

It's not about just diversity; it's about authenticity. Audiences are really excited to see more of themselves on the screen.

I feel that its important for me to be out there and to represent the face. At the same time, for me as an individual, I think the Asian-American face can be crowded with the American identity.

For some of my young female readers, it will be the first time they will have seen a Punjabi author be successful in the West. Because I'm dealing with topics that aren't always easily discussed, I know they will look up to me, because I would have done the same. So I just want to make sure I do right by them, wherever this takes me.

When I could choose which national team to play for, I could choose between Luxembourg, France, and Bosnia, and I chose Bosnia because I felt it was important to demonstrate, especially to the young people, that a dream can become true.

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us.

I write for myself, first and foremost and I also write for people, mostly women, who just want to be seen and heard and all too often aren't.

I realize that this is not what you want to put on a cover with Wonder Woman emblazoned on it. She could be in trouble, but she doesn't need to be completely out of control. So whenever I'm doing these covers, I try to make sure that there's an element where, even if there is danger, it's not something where agency is taken away from her.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.