Ben Whishaw Quotes

People are so codified - it's sad.

I felt trapped and fabricated in the fifties living up to other people's expectations.

Before I came out, I had a lot of anger. For years people would ask, 'How are you doing?' and I'd say, 'Good, fine.' It's show business, and that's what you have to show.

We're all lonely, but I'd rather be lonely by myself than with a long list of duties and obligations. I think that's why people kill themselves, really.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.

If you have a sense of irony or humour, you're usually cut down, as you're usually distorted or misinterpreted. So it does lead to us being slightly more dour and staid and predictable than would otherwise be the case, which I personally find quite frustrating - because if you don't laugh occasionally in my job, you cry most of the time.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

Being in the space that I am as a writer, and just as a black dude in America, there's this push to be cool or be what you're expected to be. There's a need for a song that puts that in perspective. I think that's an important thing for young children to hear growing up.

In our society, no one dares to be themselves.

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.

But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

It was fashionable, youre supposed to be a married lady, so I did.

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

This thing in society that you have to be a stick will always be in my mind, but that's just something I have to deal with.

We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, some of us are tossed helpless . . . ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants -- PUBLIC OPINION.

I've seen so many people in my life struggle tremendously to fit into those boxes or to live up to those expectations or pressures put upon them by whatever society's concept of 'normal' is. I get frustrated by rules and regulations. I'm frustrated by things that are exclusive to one particular life choice.

I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane.

I've noticed in England once people reach a certain level they feel they have to get married.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

Perhaps even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.