28 Labeling Quotes

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

'Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.'

In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use 'liberal' in the sense in which I have used it, the term 'libertarian' has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive. For my taste it carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.

Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it: it says 'Chicken of the Sea'.

That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather it be sex than some of the things we've got symbols of... I just hate to be a thing.

Once again we look to England for great oratory Tony Blair: Militant Liberal. Over here in America George W. Bush. Compassionate Conservative...I don't know what that is really. Kinda sounds like a Volvo with a gun rack, I don't know why!

Some called me Christ. In prison my name was a number. Some now want a sadistic fiend, and so they see me as that. So be it. Guilty. Not guilty. They are only words. You can do anything you want with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love.

(On why he hates the term 'world music'): It's a way of relegating this 'thing' into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant.

You know, I don't know about this 'Diva thing,' O.K. This 'Diva thing' is getting a little out of hand, I think. I mean if anything, I'm a divette.

My whole life I've played the role of the blonde. It's always worked for me. It's a good thing...but it can also be a bad thing if you get labeled as the 'blonde' all the time.

I am in the awkward situation of writing a foreword to a book by a gay person. This is an awkward situation not because Joe Perez is gay, but because I have to point it out. I feel the same damn irritation as having to refer to, say, Edmund White as a 'gay writer.' Nobody has to point out that I am heterosexual, although now I hear that I am not a heterosexual but a metrosexual, although, in fact, I have never had sex with a metro in my life. But I'm sure it is a wonderful experience.

The old-fashioned conservatives like Richard Cobden condemned it harshly, just like Senator Robert Byrd condemns what's going on today. The real conservatives are different from the ones that call themselves that.

'You one of those right wing nut outfits?' inquired the diplomatic Metzger. Fallopian twinkled. 'They accuse us of being paranoids.' 'They?' inquired Metzger, twinkling also. 'Us?' asked Oedipa.

Especially in the beginning, they have to be able to label the product. So they just go -'Rebel. This one's a rebel.' Wow, I had no idea! There's that hideous pressure they hit you with initially, based on your image and how you look, and I never tended that garden. I was always scared shitless of that - it's really limiting and very dangerous. (2003)

I'm going to do everything I can - fight tooth and nail - to not be put in some teen-idol category. (1988)

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.

For Paul to ridicule the term 'Islamofascist' as propaganda and to insinuate that anyone who uses it is a warmonger seeking to spread conflict in the Middle East shows how wildly out of touch he is with the vast majority of the American public.

And when they told her she's delirious

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