That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.
Once established, reputations do not easily change.
I've introduced myself with comedy, and once you've introduced yourself as something, that's where people keep you. That's where people like to hold you.
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.
You don't have to fight against being placed in a box any more than the number two has to fight against being the number three. I mean, two is not going to be the number three, ever.
You get an image in the first couple of years of your career, and then whether you like it or not, you are stuck with it for the rest of your life.
Once the world sees you as that one thing, and the better you are at that thing, the more you can only be that thing.
Something happened to me and I became really successful at something at a young age, and that stunts you in every other aspect of your life because you feel like that's what you're good at and so that's what you need to stay in.
Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan's black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood.
The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there are no fixed identities. He would have thought that someone calling himself a Buddhist has too much invested in calling himself a Buddhist.
The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
