Jean Genet Quotes

I was 15 when I did Rufio and now I've been Rufio for more of my life than I haven't been. Wrestling with that is always interesting because you don't want to be fully defined by it, but at the same time it's you, and you don't want to be ashamed of you either.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.

Then, at some point, you get identified with certain things.

I look at that person and I'm like, That's not Kelli White. That's not who I am, who I started out to be.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

As Devin, the person, I'm very different from my artistic self.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

I know what my identity is.

I think I've finally, after 72 years, gotten used to my voice, and it sounds like a friend now instead of an enemy.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.

I remember in junior high school, which is what we called it, suddenly I was looking at myself, almost through other people's eyes, and thought: how does the world see me? So that was one of the things I was really interested in, when I was writing Goodbye Stranger.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

The years between leaving school and actually becoming an adult are very important years. You make a lot of choices as to the type of life you want to lead and what type of person you want to be. There were so many people who had opinions of me, a lot of them very unflattering, that it was hard to make up my mind about who I was supposed to be.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

All I could do is lie there and think about how much her voice changed when she asked me if she was pretty, and how much she changed when I answered.

What drew me to Batman in the first place was Bruce Wayne's story, and that he's a real character whose story begins in childhood. He's not a fully formed character like James Bond, so what we're doing is following the journey of this guy from a child who goes through this horrible experience of becoming this extraordinary character. That, for me, became a three-part story. And obviously the third part becomes the ending of the guy's story.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

The first question in any interactive process with another is: now Who Am I, and Who Do I Want to Be, in relationship to that?

Mothers have the huge influence, and I feel like they're always teaching us from the day we're born what to be afraid of, what to be cautious of, what we should like and what we should look like. Then we spend half of our life trying to be not like them, and then we reach another part of our lives where we see these things we can't get rid of.

Let me tell you something. When I was young, I was an armed robber. I did robberies. And there's no adrenaline rush like that. When you're using drugs and doing robberies, it's hard to distinguish whether you're doing robberies to support your drug habit, or doing drugs to support your robbery habit.

...[She] felt as if she were both a stranger to herself and more herself than she'd ever been.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.