Mena Massoud Quotes

Kids need to see their world reflected back to them.

I do worry because it takes all types to make our culture, to make our art. We need it to be available to all.

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.

Telling diverse stories is at the heart of our culture.

Representation is very important to everyone, but especially to girls like me, and people like me, whether it be because of my body, because of my race, because of my skin color, because of my awkwardness or where I come from.

I want to be part of the storytelling that educates people and awakens a sense of compassion in other people of the kind of people they don't encounter in their daily lives very frequently.

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 grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn't telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I'm so glad that it's changing.

It's so important for young girls of color - young girls of any color - to see diverse women as the heroes of their own story.

Representation is necessary, and we all want to turn on the TV and see characters who look like us and represent us in some way.

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.

My very first story, I was around 5, and I really just wrote myself. When I was 5, I loved myself so much I gave myself a twin named Tomi. Everything started out fine. But then I didn't write another black character until I was 18.

The American girl doesn't look just one kind of way - not in 2018, not ever.

I want us to all look at ourselves and look at our stories. It doesn't matter where you come from or what journeys you've taken. Your stories matter, and they're powerful.

A lot of people come up to me all the time and say thank you for helping me be who I am. So my thing wasn't just about sexuality. It was about anyone who felt different; anyone who felt out of place. Being gay was one part of it.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.

I feel a responsibility to continue creating complex roles for black women, especially young black women.

I'm every woman. It takes a village to make me who I am.

I represent a body image that wasn't accepted in high fashion before, and I'm very lucky to be supported by the designers, stylists, and editors that I am: ones that know this is fashion; this is art. It can never stay the same. It's 2015.

If you don't believe you don't belong.

I try to do stories that make a difference - stories that affect the way people think, stories that people need to hear - and usually what drives me is to do stories about people who have no voice, people who have no political power, people who are overlooked by society.

I believe that everyone has a story, and it is important that we encourage all students to tell theirs.

Nowadays, if somebody in America is feeling alone and wants to find a coming out story, they just search 'coming out,' and they'll find millions of first-person examples of people telling their story.