The argument for '12 Years a Slave' was that - yes, it's a beautiful film. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted. It's a real story, and these stories should be told. The problem is, if they're the only stories being told, then it makes Americans of African descent - it puts them into that victim category. And that was my problem with the movie.

Joe Morton

Natto, Japanese ferment bean paste, will never cross my lips again. Spam Musubi, on the other hand, is something I love. I used to have a roommate of Vietnamese descent, and he would eat it all the time. It looked gross, but I finally had it - wrapped in seaweed and rice - it was terrific.

Adam Richman

I'm of Nigerian descent, from the Yoruba tribe. Names are very significant in that culture. It basically states your purpose in life.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

I was born and raised in New York, but my family on both sides is of Italian descent.

Aida Turturro

The premise of 'Descent' may sound pretty straightforward: One summer morning while vacationing with her family in the foothills of the Rockies, a young girl, a high-school athlete in her senior year, goes out for a run in the higher altitudes - and disappears.

Alan Cheuse

From sublime affairs of state to the stark and vulgar popular culture of our own contemporary lives, let's make this descent into the lower registers together and recognize the good, nasty fun of 'Gone Girl,' Chicago writer Gillian Flynn's novel about the mysterious disappearance of a clever and deceptive young Midwestern housewife.

Alan Cheuse

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

Ambrose Bierce

Bolshevism may be Marxian in theory, but it is Hulagoesque in practice. It may be of European descent, but it is Oriental in tradition. Oriental in mood. Oriental in temperament.

Ameen Rihani

The descent to Hades is the same from every place.

Anaxagoras

I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'

Andre Dubus III

It's hard to be a minority. People look at you a different way, like you don't belong, and I don't think many people realize just how difficult it is to live as a minority. Where I come from, we learn to tolerate one another. Whether one is of Chinese descent or Malay descent, what matters is we're part of the same country, the same world.

Andrea Hirata

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

Anthony Marra

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

Arthur Erickson

Americans have almost been conditioned to believe that the majority of people who seek to do us harm are those of Muslim descent.

Bennie Thompson

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Bernie Sanders

I idolize Gene Hackman. He is not a natural star, not an incandescent personality like Jack Nicholson, but he makes luminous the problems of being an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.

Brian Dennehy

In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

C. Wright Mills

When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

Candice Millard

My dad is from Japanese descent, my mom is from Swedish descent and, through marriages and divorces, a pretty multicultural family - a lot of Spanish speakers in the family.

Cary Fukunaga

People of African descent, most of us grew up accepting and loving Spider-Man. I still love Spider-Man. I still love the Incredible Hulk. I still have those characters that were white role models, superheroes, heroes - whatever you want to call it. You basically had no choice but to accept those.

Chadwick Boseman

The child now shewed her a narrow and rugged descent, made by cutting the red clay and stones, of which the cliffs are here composed, into a sort of rude steps.

Charlotte Smith