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National identity is something that's directly connected to our personal experiences and the decisions we make, the roads we decide to take at certain points in our life.

Having an identity is one thing. Being born into an identity is quite a different matter.

Identity for me is something that has to be played with and explored, and not become complacent about or uninterested in.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

You have to go through a mental and emotional process to recognize who you really are. I finally recognized that I cannot be defined by one country.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.