Women Born In The 1970s

"I don’t see a single concept of ‘national’ or ‘literature’. Rather, I’ve always been fascinated by language. I enjoy contemplating the great depth, complexity and delicacy of the layers of a culture in which a single language is in-built. I owe a great debt to poetry and fiction written in Korean, as I spent my adolescence immersed within these."

"Humans will not hesitate to lay down their own lives to rescue a child who had fallen onto the train tracks, yet are also perpetrators of appalling violence, like in Auschwitz. The broad spectrum of humanity, which runs from the sublime to the brutal, has for me been like a difficult homework problem ever since I was a child. You could say that my books are variations on this theme of human violence."

"I believe that trauma is something to be embraced rather than healed or recovered from. I believe that grief is something which situates the place/space of the dead within the living; and that, through repeatedly revisiting that place, through our pained and silent embrace of it over the course of a whole life, life is, perhaps paradoxically, made possible."

"I spent the autumn and winter of 2014 in Warsaw. Every day walking the unfamiliar streets of that city, tenaciously reconstructed after 95 percent had been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, the thought came to me to write about a person who resembled the city. And one day I realised that this person had to be my older sister – a baby who left the world within two hours of being born into it. I wanted to make her live again through lending her my senses, my life. Writing this book was a form of prayer intending to make the things I saw, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted, all with the warmth of my living flesh, into 'her / your' things. And, as is always the case with our prayers, at a certain point it occurred to me that I was not writing for 'her' alone."

"I think what a lot of people forget is that this is our heritage."

"My greatest job I’ve ever had is being a mother … It tops everything."

"He’s stuck with me for life."

"“We have a farm outside of Atlanta, Georgia, about 17 acres … We have a couple of goats, some chickens, some vegetables, and it is our joy.”"

"A week ago I lost my big brother, but I gained an angel… I love you… I miss you… We got our girls."

"2025 is the year of joy for me!! The question I have started asking myself before every decision is, ‘Does this bring me joy?’ If the answer is yes I move forward… If not I lovingly decline."

"We live on a farm so my husband built me a greenhouse and we’re in the process of planting, taking care of chickens and goats and really just enjoying time as a family."

"No one was there except for the two people to know exactly what happened. All I can speak to is the man that I know and I love."

"You could say that doing a certain voice requires different mic technique, but really at the end of the day it is all still acting. Whether I’m doing a VG or an animated series/movie I still have to do my work as an actor in the same way: looking at the script, asking questions, making choices. When I record a VG though often I might be running down hundreds of lines/loops in an hour, so I’m simply reading each line a few different ways and moving on at a pretty fast pace, and usually by myself in the booth. With animation, it might be original, where it will be animated afterwards, then I will get to read off the other actors in the room, which is always a treat. With dubbed animation (most of the anime) I will once again be alone, but having to work technically matching mouth flap for timing so my performance matches the movement of the already animated mouth of the character."

"It’s exciting that (voice acting is) becoming a career unto itself, people are “voice actors.” I don’t call myself just a voice actor because I’m so passionate about the on camera stuff, our web series, film and television. I’m not what would be just considered a voice actor."

"When you’re a voice actor, it’s not about you, it’s about the character. If there’s a history of that character, you want to be as true to that as you possibly can be without voice matching. Just keep the spirit alive and have it come out in your own voice. I know that’s what I did."

"My main job as a curator is to try to get people interested in history, to visit our palaces, to enjoy themselves, and to learn something, too. I try to do the same with my books, to entertain as well as to inform."

"Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors. I remember meeting someone very grand while I was making the programme who said: "Oh, I see you are going over to the dark side." I have suffered from that thinking, too, that the documents we should be using are from archives and libraries. But you can learn a lot by recreating stuff."

"There's no one way to be black. I'm black the way I know how to be. You have no idea who I am. I am black. I'm raising black men. Don't you ever think you can look at me and address me with such disdain."

"Your body doesn't have the energy it needs to filter toxins, causing it to believe that it has an infection, so it's always inflamed. You create antibodies that attack your glands, so you have to eat clean."

"I love doing comedy. I feel really comfortable there and I love to laugh and I love to be goofy. But I am probably most well known for my comedic work, which is something that I’m humbled by, but I love doing drama too. So I think it’s all about the role for me."

"I think that being a parent is the greatest soul-baring—the greatest learning experience we could have ever. We learn more — we give birth to our greatest teachers."

"A few weeks ago I went to a screening of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' at Utopia. I'm not a very introspective person but when I get on that stage, it feels even more overwhelming than showing my films at the Cannes film festival. Because standing there, I'm so close to my past. I can see how far I've come."

"We call models "muses", and that's mostly what's left in the history of art for women artists...Dora Maar was the muse of Picasso but also a photographer at the centre of the surrealist scene. And |Gabrièle Picabia was the wife of [avant-garde painter [[w:Francis Picabia||Francis] Picabia]] but also the brain of his work. It's about co-creation, not this fetishised, silent woman standing there beautiful and mute"

"It's a very bourgeois industry. There's resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. "A film can be feminist?" They don't know this concept. They don't read the book. They don't even know about the fact that "male gaze" exists. You can tell it's a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy."

"The last scene came really, really early, disconnected from even the idea of a woman painter…I wanted to write a love story and I thought, ‘What do I want to tell?’ And that scene came up really, really quickly, alone, by itself. The weird compass of the film was its last scene. That’s a compass, but it’s a high pressure one."

"We want people to have their heart broken and think about themselves, but enjoy this experience of this strong love story...But it’s also about the memory of a love story. It’s a lot about the present, the rise of desire, but it’s also about what’s left of a love story. What’s the memory of a love story. There’s these two timelines that sometimes are contiguous, contaminating one another. We are trying to propose another politic of love where it’s not about possession or donation or eternal love or death or eternity or whatever. It’s more about love as a dynamic that can only grow."

"I'm not saying that you have to love it all. [...] But, yes, you should love it all."

"I feel it is something that I have to do for my children, to be able to give them a book that has kids like them in it, just incidentally. They are not the side character, they are not there as a novelty, they are just the characters. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. People need to see themselves reflected in the culture around them."

"Racial history lays so heavily on black people – slavery, migration, racism. But I don’t want my characters to be hidden by that…"

"Suicide is generally seen in a very negative way and, though it is tragic and devastating, I've learnt from losing my own twin that there's a positive and magical side to it as well. It's about a person freeing themselves. It is actually a very courageous thing to do. To leave can be braver than to just stay here and struggle on, never knowing whether you'll ever be happy."

"There are so many expectations placed upon us, so many restricting places in which we are supposed to place ourselves in order to function in the world. There is often a struggle to hold on to who we are through all of this; either we lose the struggle and we are lost, almost deadened, or we simply don't survive at all…"

"I've always been fairly confident in what I feel and think. And part of that I think is coming from the Bay Area, where, you know, being an individual was very celebrated. Our culture of the Bay Area is a place where you want to be different. You want to be seen. You want to be heard. You want—there, conformity is the worst thing that you could aspire to."

"In terms of writing, I just wasn’t finding enough stories about contemporary African people—or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a “necessity being the mother of invention” type thing. I wasn’t finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself."

"My artistic mandate up to that point had always been: “I’m not going to talk about things close to myself. I want to go into vital issues about people who you never hear or see”…And I watched my own family’s dynamics, my own dynamics amongst my kin, and the dynamics of how these cultures had merged, and interacted, and clashed. And I just found the absurdity of our familial dynamics..."

"“Survival isn't lying down and saying, oh, poor me. It's finding ways to live and keep your light shining in the midst of the darkest circumstances.”"

"Meaningful communication is an aspect of who we are as human beings. You don’t need to know exactly what everyone’s saying word for word to hear it, to see people living in a different world and to hear that they don’t speak American English. And you know, I think people will think, “I get what’s going on,” and that’s what’s awesome…"

"I think that’s a goal in all my plays honestly, to get into the personal, but to have a macro ramification, or to look at things that people can look at as a statistic or stereotype in one way, and to make them have to spend time with a person that they may even end up relating to a little in some strange, tiny way, to see the complexity of something they might have thought of as something simply statistical and “over there somewhere.”"

"In recent days, in my discussions that I have had with people on the EU side of the negotiating table, I am really optimistic and I think they understand they have to move on some things. I voted to Leave and I still remain optimistic that we can get a good deal for the UK."

"We asked the people to decide, they decided... that means we can't come up with something else in Parliament"

"What happened was completely wrong and the prime minister has rightly apologised for that, apologised to veterans but also to all of us, because he was representing all of us. I'm from Portsmouth, I have also been defence secretary and my wish is, at the end of this week, is that all of our veterans feel completely treasured."

"It is, of course, a mystery why a workaholic with no social life and four cats is not a massive draw."

"First of all, let me address the comments the honourable lady makes about my facial expressions: my resting face is that of a bulldog chewing a wasp, and people shouldn’t read too much into that."

"I stayed in cabinet and fought to try and get a deal and to try and build a consensus, both in my party and but also in Parliament. What we have learnt though is if you are trying to get that objective, you can't take no deal off the table."

"We have a prime minister with one foot out the door and a leadership election which has split the party between cheerleaders for the frontrunner and anyone-but-the-frontrunner."

"Gone is the working mum and Boris-sceptic who got a degree of sympathy after standing down as Scottish Tory leader in August. That image has been replaced by a brazen corporate lobbyist mooching her way to the 2021 election while tapping taxpayers £63,579 a year as a part-time MSP for Edinburgh Central."

"[Davidson is now] the lowest-ranked politician in the entire [cabinet] table - most likely [due to the] fallout from her highly publicised split with the prime minister and hostility to no deal."

"I fear that having tried to be a good leader over the years, I have proved a poor daughter, sister, partner and friend. The party and my work has always come first, often at the expense of commitments to loved ones."

"Any Conservative leadership candidate must put the Union first. Jeremy [Hunt] has done so and will get my vote."

"I think there are a number of people within the Conservative Party who need to take a long, hard look at themselves. Yes, I understand of course we have got to respect the referendum result, of course we've got to deliver Brexit, but not at the expense of breaking up the United Kingdom. I would remind people of their obligations within the party - yes, we're a Conservative Party, but we're also a Unionist party, and I'd remind them that our own union of nations is every bit as important as leaving someone else's."

"My plea to people in the room is: let’s use the kick up the backside the voters have given both the main parties, to really focus minds."