Eileen Pollack Quotes

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

I'm just like my fans, and that's the way I like it.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

I've loved taking on roles that have a very universal message that lots of people can identify and relate to - and at the end of the day can get people talking.

For me, I feel like I relate to a lot of people.

Everybody's got a story on their beards. I guess it's just a way of finding common ground with people you otherwise might not know.

My favorite word was a word James Lapine used repeatedly in 'Sunday in the Park with George,' which was the word 'connect.' All I want to do is connect.

People feel like they know me, in a strange way, like they grew up with me or they went to high school with me!

When I talk to another Afghan I am his or her equal and that moves me to tears.

I'm Nigerian. I'm African. I have a lot to say. Apart from what I say, though, is the feeling. People can relate to that feeling. It's a reciprocal relationship. They feed off me and I feed off them.

Most people think they don't have anything to relate to a drag queen, but shockingly there's a lot we can talk about.

A lot of the emotions we portray are universal themes that resonate with everyone, so the fact that people feel invested in our partnership is truly remarkable.

Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.

New York has given me a lot, but I still don't consider it home.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? They have their own 'gods and idols' and we have nothing in common. ... If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.