Hollywood is like a really sad, grown up version of high school where people get labeled as 'cool,' 'not cool,' 'jock,' 'bombshell,' 'quirky'... it's like a caste system. You're either in, or you're out.
If I'd wanted this place to fill up with every fat Irish rose that passes by, I'd've said so.
The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.
People want to be with their own and want to be separated from others.
Hollywood's racist. Hollywood is sorority racist. It's like - we like you, Rhonda, but you're not a Kappa.
How I exist in this world is that you're in or you're out. You are family or you are the enemy.
We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.
I resent anyone coming in and claiming to be a minority as I am.
Burns was African American.
Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.