Kehinde Wiley Quotes
The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
Quotes to Explore
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I think when I first started acting there were different people who I thought, 'I want that person's career or that person's career.' And as time has gone on, it's become really clear to me what is important to me; getting the best roles, the roles that I feel are challenging and scary and that I haven't done yet.
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Export anything to a friendly country except American management.
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In American films, Russians are often portrayed like cartoon villains without clear motivations.
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I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole.
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Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.
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I think it's a mistake to try to pin down one particular reason for a person's personality. Don't we all, for many reasons, act differently in different circumstances and with different people?
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Frank Capra, Hollywood's Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the 'Saturday Evening Post' covers of Norman Rockwell. 'It's A Wonderful Life,' the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch.
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Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
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For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
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All he cares about is going out there with his Jack Daniels bottle. Nothing has changed. That's kind of sad. If David was doing better than he used to be, then that would be different. But it was a joke and he made it that way.
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Growth should take care of the fear of job losses. People will be challenged to do different things. For people who are not up to it, purely based on objective assessment, that's a different issue, which, you do it anyway.
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The American Dream is that any man or woman, despite of his or her background, can change their circumstances and rise as high as they are willing to work.
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I'm the first American designer who went all over the world.
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We have a vision of South Africa in which black and white shall live and work together as equals in conditions of peace and prosperity.
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The misperception about the South is that everybody is racist, and all black people are victims, that what was prevalent in the '60s is only relegated to the South.
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Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I'd been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder.
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It's funny, because I've never thought of myself as a Hispanic actor, like in 'American Gangster,' I'm playing an Italian. I've always been fortunate enough to have been allowed to play all these diverse roles.
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Up until recently, I've always been a vintage store guy. I get a lot of my clothes second hand. I really enjoy being able to look through different styles you can find and how eclectic the vintage store vibe is.
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I firmly believe that every six years, a person goes through a serious change. Think about it: At 6, you start school. At about 12, you start hitting puberty. And then it goes on. You start hitting these different mental levels, and people change. I think that's part of the reason the divorce rate is so high.
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I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.
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What sets 'Some Nights' apart from anything we've ever done is the hip-hop influence. Not so much the actual sound of hip-hop, but more the vibrato and the artistry that comes with it. Right now, the artists that seem to be pushing to be the greatest artists and are trying to change the world are hip-hop artists.
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RZA is one of the most unique individuals and rap artists that I have worked with.
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You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.
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The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.
