Nicole Maines Quotes

I am just convinced that people want to see people on TV who are more like themselves.

What I'm really excited for is to see the evolution of trans characters and see more diverse stories be told, so that every time we're on screen, we're not really playing the part of educator and having to explain the experience to the audience, because it will have already been normalized.

I don't want to be an ambassador for too many charities, because it's a far stronger message to be a person with a disfigurement going about their life doing everyday things.

It's about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?

I know one of the reasons I first started making Youtube videos was because no one looks like me.

I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out.

In creating my YouTube videos, I don't want to speak for my audience and the people I represent; I want to amplify their voices.

While books expand horizons by exposing us to worlds outside our own, children also need to see themselves, their experiences and their cultures reflected in books they read. Unfortunately, for too many children, this is not the norm.

I'm grateful to the LGBTQ community for giving me the courage to write music about who I am and not just about my sexual orientation.

It's very important to me that people get to see themselves in stories. When someone tells me they've never seen themselves, I have a new goal.

I just want different narratives for people of color, especially women of color. I just want something that's different. I don't want us to be put in a box. I want it to be kind of a redefinition of who were are. If I can even achieve that in a tiny way, I'll be good. I'll be good.

I want to be in everything, but that's because I haven't seen someone who looks like me in everything. I want to play a superhero. I want to be the love interest. I want to write my own stuff and create my own projects. I want to be in French films.

I grew up looking for myself onscreen and never could find myself. And I believe that I am supposed to be Toula to show people that it's O.K. to be different.

By making the gay character funny and sweet but above all normal, you make a far better, longer lasting statement than you would if you had an entirely gay comedy.

I'm so proud that now you can exist as a gay man and be an Olympian, and it can be beneficial rather than negative. So it's amazing. And I just think I feel so liberated now that I've been out of the closet for a while, and so I'm free in that I just get to be myself, speak freely, act freely, and I think that I am competing confidently.

Black women come with all sorts of personalities. So it's time for media to wise up and show us in all of our complexity.

I think kids in every minority need to see people like themselves in books; that's an acknowledgment of their existence on this planet and in this society.

Look, yes, I'm a Muslim woman and I want to bring my community to the table, but I also want to make sure that I'm not being tokenized.

The reason I got into filmmaking was super naive: to change the world, you know? To really make the voices that we don't get to hear heard and the images and the stories that we don't get to see seen. I would like to normalize that.

I just didn't see any toys that looked like me when I was a kid.

There's room for everyone, and everyone is wanted and needed. Whoopi showed me that. When I first saw 'The Color Purple,' it was so huge. That was the first time I had seen myself, my mother, my aunts, women that I had known my whole life on-screen. It gives us hope, and it gives us confidence.

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

There are just so many brilliant voices out there. I'm not the funniest person out there, I'm not the best interviewer. I'm not the best at anything, but I really just am a big fan of everyone. I'm really driven by trying to make sure that representation is out there.

I want the next 16-year-old kid who looks like me to know he's not automatically the bad guy. Hopefully, that kid can look at Mustafa Ali and say, 'Hey, he's not the bad guy, and I don't have to be, either.'

I'm proud to carry that torch and be like, 'I'm gay! I'm black! Hang your dreams on me. Hang your hopes on me. I'll carry them to the best of my ability.'