Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I will normally eat about seven or eight mince pies in one sitting. Sometimes, I can get to double figures. My friends, and probably most people, stop at two, so they probably dislike me a bit for it.
I'm from Leeds so it's a big part of me and I like getting to know people, find out about them, see different backgrounds and where they've come from. Sometimes the struggles relate to my own struggles.
It messes me up sometimes when I go on stage and people say my name wrong. Say my name wrong with all these different syllables. I've heard everything. My name is easy as 1-2-3. Jer-eh-mih, syllable-wise.
I do know that I like to play characters that are sometimes a little on the outside - that's because it feels kind of romantic and sexier to me. I really think they are the people that we learn lessons from.
I always have a beard between jobs. I just let it grow until they pay me to shave it. People are quite surprised it's ginger. Sometimes they ask me if dye my hair and I always say 'Wow, no!' I'm 'trans-ginger.'
It's hard for people sometimes to relate to me. They weren't in the military, they weren't injured overseas in Iraq, they weren't burned, they didn't go through 33 surgeries, or two and a half years in the hospital.
Nicki Minaj thanked me on the first mixtape that she put out. She shouted me out, said thank you for allowing her to borrow my English accent sometimes. And honestly, a lot of people have told me that I've influenced them.
Sometimes, fame does scare me. When people know where you are and what you're doing, that can be frightening because I'm such a private person. So I like to try and keep things light-hearted and stay as private as possible.
People often confuse visibility with a lot of other things. Sometimes I become a proxy for things that just aren't true about me. People will say, 'DeRay got millions of dollars in grants.' That's just not true... I'm broke.
There's a play that Chekhov wrote called 'Uncle Vanya,' and I when I was in school, I played Sonya, and sometimes people ask me if there was ever a role I could play again, that's definitely the role I would play again: Sonya in 'Uncle Vanya.'
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves.
Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.
When I was an undergrad at Stanford, there was a girl named Jennie Kim who worked for the school newspaper. Sometimes people would come up to me and talk to me about articles she had written. 'That one on getting a Brazilian was hilarious', some guy said, high-fiving me.
I've been a lot more into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which was a bit complicated for me to understand the language of each social media, because they all talk in different ways. It's a nice way for me to tell people I appreciate them, which I forget to do sometimes.
The thing about having a very young audience in the theatre is that sometimes they laugh at the bullying scenes. It's really interesting, what that means. It still confuses me slightly, you know; someone's getting quite brutally bullied on stage and people are laughing. I think it's very hard being young.
I think that connection with humans is so important. Sometimes I'll do this monologue and talk to the crowd, like, 'Come on, let's really connect here.' I don't think a lot of people understand it's a two-way exchange. Some people go to a show and are like, 'Yeah, you make me feel.' That's not how it works.
I read all of the stories that people write about me. The ones that are really interesting are the ones where they actually write their take on me as opposed to just printing what I said, because they're asking similar questions so often, sometimes it just sounds like I'm answering the questions different intentionally.
Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.
It took me a while to learn that certain people may have important skills that are not always blazingly apparent. Gradually I came to realize - slow as I may have been - that what mattered was performance, that sometimes people might have to be helped to develop, and that it takes all kinds to make an organization run properly.
Sometimes people ask me, 'You do stand-up?' I try explaining what I do, and I don't think they really get it. So: 'Yeah, I do stand-up.' I wish there was one word to express what I do - that way, I don't sound arrogant. Whenever I say I'm a performer, people think I'm a performance artist: 'She paints herself white and pretends to be a flower.'