Laura Linney Quotes

I'm quite looking forward to the fact that people know me as Richard rather than Craig.

The thing with labels is they're not for you, they're for other people. Like labels are just a word for other people to understand you and that's it.

People see me as Andre first. Then they see me as someone who happens to be a Muslim.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

I don't know that any of us can control our own image. We are what other people see.

I know, for a fact, that I'm a very different person on my own than I am with someone else. We are different with each other. These things are constantly adjusted. And that's true of humans. That's not just true of famous people.

I'm still the same and I don't feel any different but when the elevator doors open and everybody gasps, it's an alienating feeling.

My books are more about people experimenting with different identities and social models in a short-term way before they can break through to something authentic.

I've only ever been mistaken for myself. People draw a lot of comparisons to all of the round-faced, mustached men of entertainment that make me cringe and sick to my stomach about how the world really sees me and they're right.

My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads?

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

When I walk out into the street or go to the toilet, I don't think of myself as being black. Of course, other people think of me as black when I walk into a pub. Obviously being black is a part of me.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

As I became George professionally and everyone called me George, Yog became the name that people who knew me from before started to use. It became more valuable to me.

People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

I sort of refuse to be an outsider, even though I know that I very much look like one to a lot of people, and I refuse to view myself in such terms.

Drag threatens people because it exposes and mocks identity. Because most people believe that they are what it says they are on their driver's license. But the truth is we are all born naked, and the rest is drag.

Each person tells you who they think they are, and who they think you are.

I wanted to see myself as something different, and I wanted to convince people that I was capable of something other than what they would expect from me.

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

If we think about sexual life for a gender life, it seems to me that we have to allow for certain kinds of changes or certain kinds of ways of reconceptualizing ourselves.