Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I hit 16, I got a scooter to ride to school. It was bright pink, and I saw on the ownership papers that Jonathan Ross once owned it. My friends slated me for it because of the colour, but it was cool. My father used to ride, and my mother's boyfriend has a bike, so we're a bit of a biker family.
I can't say to Elton, 'Hey, let's walk around the corner and have a coffee.' Someone as well-known as that can't go anywhere in the world without being recognised. Elton has written the soundtrack to a lot of people's lives, so they feel a kinship with him, so they come up, and that does colour things.
Identity is becoming more dependent on what people are willing subscribe to and less dependent on objective criteria such as skin colour or where they're born. Ways of identifying blackness are no longer black or white. It's not a case of us or them, you can now be us and them; like them but different.
Race, for me, should be social and cultural, rather than the colour of your skin. Anton Ferdinand would have more in common with John Terry than he does with some West African from Nigeria. John Terry will have more in common with Anton Ferdinand than a Slav from Eastern Europe who happens to be white.
There needs to be more film directors of colour. They bandy about the word 'diversity' a lot, but when I say 'of colour,' I mean Asian, black - I mean people of all colour. We need to have those voices given the opportunity, not told that their films will not be distributed or will not sell well abroad.
I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don't think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth; it's a different kind of love.
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'
Never work against what you are. I never have, and I've never minded being typecast. Some of my agents have been like: try and change, Victoria. Cut your hair off, colour it, have a breast reduction.You have to this and that, to get a serious acting role. But I would rather use what I am to my advantage.
I'm one of those sad cases who've never wanted to be anything but a writer. I started writing my first novel when I was five years old. I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember spending considerable time trying to get the title right, though this had more to do with crayon colour than scansion.
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.
Being an immigrant and living in England, I feel like I lived in two worlds. There was the world that, when I was at school with my friends, was very English, and then I'd go home to another country, with exotic foods and colours. I have a sense of colour pairings, and that came from my background, I think.
I think it's important to keep your personal life to yourself as much as you can. It protects your sanity and you need to have boundaries. And it helps that enchantment of watching an actor. If you know someone's favourite colour or what they like to do on a Sunday, you won't fall for the character as much.
The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn. But there are splashes of crimson or rust-red colours from a few indigenous trees, like the rowan, as well as from introduced species, like the North American red oak.
The fight still isn't people of colour versus white. It's the people versus the system built to keep us down. That's the first line of the Constitution. And the system is manmade but is made of no man. Everyone, regardless of class, creed, culture and ethnicity can fight the system and help to break it down.
As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.
I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.
We always had power shortages in the country. I was living right next to the border with China, and it was the only country I could compare to my own. When I looked across the river, it was a completely different world - there were no people dying. It looked like a place full of colour, and that's what confused me.
I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story.
It had never occurred to me that my colour - or lack of it - was an issue for some people, but then I moved to Sydney, and apparently it was. People look at me and don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. Thankfully, my mother raised me well in knowing where I come from and who I am, and I'm proud of that.
I think for women, especially women of colour, hair has so much to do with our identity and our confidence levels. I've made a conscious choice after growing up and feeling insecure and trying to achieve this look that actually wasn't me, where I've finally stopped relaxing my hair and went back to my natural texture.
Being an actor, I have to blow-dry, colour, and use all sorts of products on my hair. The best-ever 'Pantene Total Damage Care' range takes care of the damage from the core. The shampoo and conditioner both have been life savers for me and have saved my hair from all the damage it goes through due to the daily styling.
Cyborg represents not just people who are differently abled: he is also a representation of the black community and people of colour within the Justice League. Being able to don both those mantles with the integrity which that character would need to be portrayed and was adhered to was something that was very important.
Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there's always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
If you're looking at the people who head the institutions, there are very few African Americans or people of colour. I'm talking about the major theatres that position themselves as serving all audiences. What you find is, by and large, people who are shaping what we see, and the people who are the tastemakers are white.
It was a gradual process, realising I was different. I remember at primary school getting a worksheet with sums printed on it. I thought that they must have run out of the right colour inks and sizes for the numbers, because they were all the same, which isn't how I experienced numbers at all. To me, nine is big and blue.
When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with black eyeliner all around the eye, but for someone with my kind of skin tone and hair colour, using brown is actually better than black. I've also learnt from makeup artists how to apply lipstick in the correct way: by starting with the Cupid's bow first and working your way around.
The writing is the springboard for your intuitive stuff and then you see, maybe a colour of what you want to achieve. Then you bring in the technique you've learnt. But when you're on film, you're not always in control of that. That's what makes me believe in a kind of collective unconscious, a sort of experience you draw on.
I have a voice inside. A voice that I am forever trying to silence. A voice that calls me in when I want to be out, playing. A voice that is always sad. That is always terrified. That always wants to sit in the darkened room, away from noise and movement and colour - away from any experience that could prove to be challenging.
The piano is an instrument that can easily sound overly thick, and I love to think that I can work with textures - particularly the inner textures inside the melody or the bass line. There is an analogy there with painting; I love paintings where you see colour underneath the colour and, underneath that, more texture and shape.
In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.
After making my notes in the afternoon, I usually visit the fighters in their dressing rooms before they go out. I check what colour trunks they'll be wearing and sometimes the pronunciation of their names, particularly if they're from eastern Europe or Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. I'll make sure I write those out phonetically.
In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.
Although someone's vote may hurt me by supporting the structures in place that hold people of colour, women, and LGBT+ people down, some people just don't realise that these structures exist. The way someone votes doesn't make them a bad person; it just means that, at the time, this was the best decision they thought they could make.
Nelson Mandela, Dada Vaswani, Harsh Mander, Shabana Azmi - I admire their humanitarian work. But sadly even Nelson Mandela could not keep corruption out of his cabinet and within a year, I am told, the victims of apartheid turned into perpetrators of corruption on their own people. Greed has no boundaries of colour or country does it?
When I reached America, there was so much space and colour. The possibilities seemed endless. At least that's how I felt at 18. But of course, I didn't have to take the usual immigrant route of battling to find a job and a home in a strange country. I could play tennis. I spoke the language, and I was making money. It was easy, really.
Stuart Hall was an utterly unique figure. Although he arrived at the age of 19 from Jamaica and spent the rest of his life here, he never felt at home in Britain. This juxtaposition was a crucial source of his strength and originality. Because of his colour and origin, he saw the country differently - not as a native, but as an outsider.
Ajax is a multicultural club, and we have found that many talented immigrant players quit when they reach puberty. So we wanted to tackle this problem with someone from the same background who had come through it. And that was Edgar Davids. During one of our fights, I pointed that out to him. But it had nothing to do with his skin colour.
People act like art is a white thing - or not for people of colour - when, really, so much culture and art comes from people of colour. I want everyone to get into what I am doing. So sometimes I don't like to work just in an art context because it feels like a lot of people aren't going to see it. I like it to be a part of everyday life.
I think football is a game where people come together and football should bring everybody together, whether it is religion or skin colour or where you come from. We should be happy to enjoy that moment together, those 90 minutes where we can show love. Because I think football is love - and when love is not there, for what should we play?
During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.
Yoga is not a belief system - it is not a new religion, philosophy or a teaching but a technology. I call it a technology because you don't have to believe it; you just have to learn to use it. It does not matter what your religion is, what your colour is, what your race is, or where you come from. If you learn to use yoga, it works for you.
I can make 10 jackets of the same colour, same two pockets and same length, that will look like 10 completely different jackets when you put them on. It's about the way they are cut - it makes them look and feel completely different and move differently, and that's a never-ending study. People who wear my clothes will know exactly what I mean.
It's important for people of colour to have the opportunities to play characters that are as nuanced - as three-dimensional, as human - as the characters who we traditionally see getting to play the protagonist. The good guys and the bad guys. The reason that is important is because it's a better reflection of the reality of the world we live in.
Once, a makeup artist put a little gold highlighter on my Cupid's bow, and it accentuated the lip colour and brought the whole makeup look together. It was just a little thing, but I loved it. I do it myself now, but I have to double check myself. I'm like, 'Is this too much?' You don't want to be leaving home with a big glob of gold on your face.