Viv Albertine Quotes

I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.

When you're a girl, you have to be everything, You have to be dope at what you do, but you have to be super sweet, and you have to be sexy, and you have to be this and you have to be that and you have to be nice, and you have to - it's like, I can't be all of those things at once. I'm a human being.

Sometimes a woman's looks or sensuality are too readily wrapped up in their power.

Being a woman means everything to me.

There's a great deal of tension between so many kind of distinctive and restrictive female archetypes and images in the world. When you play with the archetypes, you get free.

As women, our identity becomes subsumed by the fact that we are wives, daughters and mothers, and that becomes our all-encompassing identity. It happens with women because we are naturally driven towards being caretakers and being sacrificing.

I do think there's a preoccupation that women understandably have with this idea of the roles we're meant to play and whether or not those roles serve us or ultimately kind of imprison us.

I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology.

Being with someone makes you happier and more content as a human being and takes your personality to greater heights and vice versa. And I don't think that's being too demanding.

I've always been very clear: I never want to be known just as somebody's girlfriend.

I get to define for myself what being a success is.

Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.

I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.

The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.

It's very important for females to feel empowered. It took me a long time to find that inside me.

All of the Arabic women I grew up listening to or watching had a very strong character.

It's hard for women every single day; we have to be nice, but not too nice, ambitious, but not too ambitious. It puts a lot of pressure on what we should and can be.

Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy… But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

A man spends his whole life trying to prove his worth to others. A woman spends her life trying to prove her worth to herself.

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.

Am I going to be able to be the person I want to be in this relationship?

You take girls, for example. They're copying their moms and magazines and everything to know how to act around guys. I mean it's not like in movies where girls like assholes or anything like that. It's not that easy. They just like somebody that can give them purpose.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

[The Women's Room] was the first thing I read that explained a lot of the feelings I was having and a lot of the rage and the feeling uncomfortable in my body and knowing that I was feeling a certain way in the world, but I didn't have the language for it.

There were a lot of different things [in The Women's Room ]. I don't really want to summarize it in this way. It's about a woman's awakening, a woman who came of age in the '50s and is a teenager - actually, she's a little bit older - in the '60s and part of the women's movement and how she ends up there.