Alexander Lebedev Quotes

I'm not ambitious and I don't need to work for The Man.

You can't always let people do their own thing.

The important thing for me when I look at characters is to consider the kind of constraints placed upon them. Now, me personally, I don't like to have a lot of constraints placed upon me.

You can't live your life to suit other people. The harder you try, the more restrictions they'll put on you just for the fun of seeing you jump through their hoops.

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered !My life is my own.

I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.

I was kind of raised with the suggestion that I had a duty to do; that life was real, life was earnest. And I hated that, actually. I needed to be liberated, to be told that I could live the life that I wanted to live; that I didn't need a job, or to be shouted at; that I could be myself; that I could be happy.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

I've always had a healthy disregard for authority - it allows me to do my job as a portrait photographer and not as someone who is playing the power game.

You cannot live your life looking at yourself from someone else's point of view.

I'm going to be true to what I want to do, because if I care what people think about me, I'm a puppet. Which I have been in my life. And you can't live life that way, man!

I did not let people tell me what to do, and I never wanted to be a groupie.

I can't imagine people telling me what to do - I just can't imagine it.

If you let society and your peers define who you are, you're the less for it.

I didn't want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

I really do like to work. I will work again. But on my terms.

I'm an independent type. No one tells me what to do.

If I didn't want to work for a couple of years, I wouldn't have to-it's a great feeling, to know I'm doing it because I want to do it.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

I do not organize my private life with an eye to my career.

Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.

I pride myself on breaking any box that anyone wants to put me in.

Freedom is relative.

I never set out to be rich and famous. I wanted to follow my own path.

I will always do what I want to do and I won't go with the crowd.