Toyin Quotes

#1. With drooping shoulders The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose.

Bertolt Brecht

#2. I don't think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.

Toyin Odutola

#3. I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.

Toyin Odutola

#4. We are linked and not ranked. Ever butty is equal, everyone is the same.

Amy Richards

#5. For a while, I was nervous about portraying women because of the objectification that automatically comes with it, whether the artist intends or not.

Toyin Odutola

#6. Uncle Junior is a criminal, which makes him a villain, so it makes people want to watch him. My whole life as an actor has been preparing for something like this.

Dominic Chianese

#7. [E]ven in getting the wonderful things we long for, we tend to live in want of something more[.]

Steve Hagen

#8. My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

Toyin Odutola

#9. I moved around a lot when I was a child; two of the houses I grew up in have totally disappeared. One was burnt in a riot, and the other was pulled down.

Toyin Odutola

#10. If we did not believe that truth is universal, why should so many missionaries endure these hardships? It is precisely because truth is common to all countries and all times that we call it truth. If a true doctrine were not true alike in Portugal and Japan we could not call it true.

Shusaku Endo

#11. It's kind of a language I've developed over time that's basically breaking up the face into components and planes. Inside each plane, I draw gradation marks, and when planes come together, they form sinews, a hairlike weave that's like a landscape of the face.

Toyin Odutola

#12. I needed to create something I could take with me wherever I went.

Toyin Odutola

#13. The desperate addict is closer to the heart of grace than the devout moralist.

Tullian Tchividjian

#14. I'm really interested in independent publishers and memes and mini comics. But even before that, I was interested in Japanese manga and anime.

Toyin Odutola

#15. When I was in school, I conceptually didn't want black people to have context, to take it out of all that history. I wanted nothing to indicate where they are or what time it is, to place them anywhere.

Toyin Odutola

#16. Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.

Toyin Odutola

#17. If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.

Ben Shahn

#18. The graphic style itself is influenced by a lot of very layered and detailed comics that I read as a kid, like 'Vagabond' by Takehiko Inoue.

Toyin Odutola

#19. I don't want to be the only good thing in the world.

Ann Brashares

#20. Dessert doesn't count if you eat under an assumed identity.

Valerie Harper

#21. My parents' mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them.

J.D. Vance

#22. There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.

Oscar Wilde