Models From The United States

"Since I was little, I've always said when I'm in the U.S., I'm American, but when I'm in China, I'm Chinese, I preserve it by having friends and being able to communicate with people because that's the best way to transmit culture."

"After a sentimental burn I had decided to participate but without wanting to tie myself to anyone. As then happened to me with Jeremias, you never know what awaits us."

"My dream is to lead. I speak fluent Italian, English and Spanish and I am studying Russian. From the point of view of the feelings and the path, I was burned because I went out there with a person who was not interested in me. I would be afraid of relapsing again. I don't know if I would be able to trust another person again but above all I would no longer want to have a television relationship."

"Known of the respectability on the part of everyone. I've always been called the villain of reality because unfortunately I'm one of the few real ones. When I think of something, I expose it, regardless of whether it may later please the public."

"Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram? This, to me, is bullying. I am proud to be Palestinian (from my father descendent)."

"“You can’t run from your reflection… you can try to lighten your skin, change your hair, but the one thing you can’t run from is yourself. I want to influence people of color to be proud of where they come from and to reconnect with their roots.”"

"“Our ways as Indigenous people go hand in hand with this land, because we are the land. All of us are the land.”"

"“It’s great to finally have representation of our Indigenous people. We don’t look one way; we’re diverse. Having that representation is going to echo out our voices to be heard in spaces that they're usually not heard. I hope that inspires creativity within our community, and also confidence—a sense of confidence to be strong and to hold our head high.”"

"“Long hair to me is a symbol of pride. A pride that has been marketed as shameful by Western belief systems. Back in the day, Indigenous children across the Americas were forced into boarding schools, and the idea was to kill the Indian, save the man. They would cut off our hair and would physically and mentally abuse us to forget our cultural ways and language and to forcefully take on someone else’s. I wear my hair long to honor my ancestors and the sacrifice they made, because they didn’t have a choice. I have the option to grow it long. So I hold my hair with pride.”"

"I wanted to do a show to give people whom I have grown up with, whether they were Filipino, Mexican or whatever, the platform to speak for themselves."

"Rejection is a part of my job. It has been a part of my career as a food person and a filmmaker. It was certainly part of my job as an actor, and even more part of a job as a model. So, it is something that I have to accept. It’s not for the faint of heart."

"The world is getting bigger and smaller at the same time. The possibilities and opportunities to taste different kinds of foods are much more prevalent today than even 10 or 15 years ago. At the same time, because people are traveling, in spite of certain parts of the world that are dangerous, you do get to try more things. With the Internet and Instagram, you get to know about all these funky dishes."

"And the truth is, models are freaks of nature. We are not normal people, and we're just born this way because of a genetic cocktail that our parents gave to us. You know, most of us have a really high metabolism."

"You know how you’re completely different with your mom than you are with your best friend, than you are with your romantic partner, than you are with your boss? They’re just different facets of me."

"Growing older gracefully means having a keen curiosity about learning things about the world that you didn’t know yesterday, no matter how many yesterdays you've had."

"New York City was my first introduction to America. It was a beautiful welcome because in the streets I saw people of all colors, wearing different outfits, clearly from different parts of the world. While I was still feeling like a foreigner, an immigrant, an outsider, there were so many people I could point to even as a young child who looked completely different, too."

"The best way to improve matters in your own actions is to first understand and accept the reasons for systemic prejudice and how that discrimination manifests in people’s lives over generations. Then you have to accept the ways in which some groups — perhaps your own — have benefited from this societal favoritism. And then you have to open your mouth and be an active member of your community to vote out elected officials who are part of the problem."

"Just by the very fact that my mother divorced my father — it was so taboo to have a divorce in India and you were ostracized — I saw her break barriers within her own life."

"The professional food world is dominated by men. But most of the actual cooking of food in the world is done by women. And we women have always had to make do with whatever we can. We’re a little bit like water—we find our way because we’ve had to."

"I would love to write more children’s books. I think children can understand complex things so long as you explain them in words they can wrap themselves around."

"I’ve been told that I’m not allowed to be this person and be a woman, I’m not allowed to be this person and be a Jew, I’m not allowed to be this person and be from New York, all these things. The more I deal with that, I realize how many other people are dealing with the exact same thing, and that actually scared me, and encouraged me to reject it."

"I love acting. Modeling is fun, too, but I feel like there is more room to stretch yourself and open yourself up to new experiences with acting. That's why I got into acting in the first place."

"I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different."

"I grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and used to dream that I would grow up to be just like her. In a way, Teen Wolf has a lot of those kinds of characters. We're just kids by day, and yet we're trying to fight demons and werewolves and bad people and save people that we love."

"I've grown up with racism my entire life. I've been bullied, sent to the hospital, beat up, I've been called a Chink and a Gook. Every single racial slur an Asian person can be called, I've been called it."

"If you are friends with someone, and you're like 'Hey, what ethnicity are you,' that's cool. But you wouldn't walk up to a white person and say, 'What kind of white are you?'"

"I didn’t think I had a chance to win but I wished on a star and it came true."

"My parents began their married life together in a Bronx tenement before later relocating to Manhattan's East Side. The year after they wed, they welcomed my brother, Melrose, a name my father had loved since the day he spotted it on a street sign in the Bronx. Six days before Christmas in 1924, I arrived with my thumb poked in my mouth and nary a strand of hair. A year and a half later, my sister, Emily, came along to complete our family, crossing the "T" on the Tyson five."

"The truth is, I've always been quietly proud of my real age. Why wouldn't I want to celebrate every crease in my brow, all that hard-earned wisdom that lives between the folds? If my first manager, Warren Coleman, hadn't been so insistent that I age myself down—he feared, and perhaps rightfully so, that an industry rife with female age discrimination would count me out of a lot of roles—I may have just omitted my age, rather than changing it. It's nobody's business. But when the Kennedy Center honor came around, I felt it was important to set the public record straight. Months before I learned I was to receive the award, I'd celebrated my ninetieth birthday. During the press blitzkrieg surrounding the Kennedy Center ceremony, I spoke that number aloud with nary a quake in my voice. "When were you born?" one reporter asked me. "December 19, 1924," I answered. For me, it was not a matter to be ashamed of. It was a journey to delight in."

"…it happened because I learned that I could speak through other people. I was a very shy child. I was an observer. I would sit and observe and listen and watch people's actions in order to understand what they were. I wanted to know what prompted them to say and do the things that they did. I sucked my fingers for 12 years. I never spoke ... but I was a great observer."

"To thine on self be true." "Do that, and you’ll have no regrets."

"…I was doing a promotion for Sounder. And after the film was completed, this journalist said that he discovered a bit of bigotry in himself. But he realized that this Black boy ... [actor] Kevin Hooks calls his father Daddy. And when I asked why, he said, "That's what my son calls me." And I tell you, I was so stunned. It took me a few minutes to catch my breath in order to question whether this man thought that we were human. You know, why can't my son call his Black father Daddy, as his sons called him. And it was at that time that I decided I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. There were certain issues I had to address and I would use my career as my platform."

"I wish people knew the Miles Davis that I knew. Really. Because you can walk into a bookstore and you see reams of books about Miles Davis. And few people who wrote those books know him. The Miles Davis that I know and knew is not the Miles Davis that you'll read about in those books. I had the good fortune to be close enough to him to have him reveal himself to me the first moment we met. It is the Miles Davis that kept me with him as long as it did. Not only was he brilliantly talented, he was brilliantly sensitive. And that is the Miles Davis that people ... don't know that he was trying to protect."

"Challenges make you discover things about yourself you never really knew. They are what make the instrument stretch what make you go beyond the norm"

"I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there's nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it."

"Just stick with it. Just stick with it. There's always a reason why you keep going in the direction you chose to go in."

"I think I always had a performer somewhere inside of me, even though, believe it or not, I was quite shy in high school and before that I had a very shy side that I didn’t really shed until my first year at Columbia University. Like much of my freshman class, I thought at the time that I was going to go work on Wall Street. That’s what I wanted to do. I figured I’d wear a power suit, carry a briefcase and trade and yell and buy low and sell high. I always say, though, that no matter what career I chose, I think I would have been happy because I’m a happy person and I’d want to choose something that I enjoy doing. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I’m in the position that I’m in now because I do love what I do, but it was something that wasn’t really a part of my life until I moved to New York and was at school."

"It’s a lot less consistent work, but I think with movies, you get to do such a huge range of emotions as a character, where as TV, you kind of stay on the same page. But I’d be happy with either"

"I try and do as much as I can in terms of giving my time when I have it cause it's like I get to live this life going new places, meeting new people and as hard as it is I mean I get an opportunity that a lot of people don't get to have so when I can do something and lend my time and make people happier or send a message and more people will see because I'm on TV. I mean, that's so key and I think everyone should keep that when there in a position like mine or definitely a position above mine. I mean you gotta give back I've been lucky enough to get so much that I have to give back. I don't know what I would do if I didn't give back so um, all those I mean any organization that's willing to lend time and really help people is so important and so great."

"When I’m creating music, I don’t have an agenda for a sound or a genre or a message, I just want it to be truthful and representative of the lyrical content that means something to me, and the music that I love."

"Relationships can be so complex, especially during a pandemic."

"Whenever I quit porn, I'll be starting at square one again—I am going to be where all my friends were ten years ago. I don't know if I want to have kids, so that is a huge issue right now in my mind, too..."

"I don’t like anything that makes fun of Asian culture or makes it look dumb. It’s such a thin line to walk and everyone draws that line someplace different. It’s such a subjective thing."

"You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair. I don’t blame them. I actually understand. He’s a beloved character and people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor."

"Absolutely. I love him. I loved him with all my heart, and I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work. And I couldn’t. I have no bad feelings or ill will toward him at all. I know that might be hard to understand or it might be really easy to understand, if you’ve ever loved anybody."

"I don't presume the average person should know those things. And so I don't take it personally. But even somebody who is sure I'm deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I'm lying, you still couldn't look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there's been a fair representation."

"I didn't punch you, by the way. (...) I didn't hit you across the face in a proper slap, but I was hitting you. I was not punching you."

"I use "pledge" and "donate" synonymous with one another. They are the same thing."

"I don't label myself one way or another—I have had successful relationships with men and now a woman. I love who I love; it's the person that matters."

"I was given a script, then given new versions of the script that had taken away scenes that had action in it, that depicted my character and another character — without giving any spoilers away — two characters fighting with one another. They basically took a bunch out of my role. They just removed a bunch."