Jasmila Zbanic Quotes

I hated the idea that I would be like my father. Which is one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to be a writer and wanted to be an actor instead. I wanted to go in a total different direction. But, of course, I ended up being a writer anyway.

I come from a family of losers, and I've rejected my family as something I don't want to be like.

The great lesson I got from my parents is how not to treat your children. To break that chain, even if I don't do anything else, at least I've done that.

In a way, our family is our modern identity.

I'm kind of crazy with karma. I really believe that everything you do revisits you, so, I'm really adamant about the kids seeing the grandparents, so like, I can see my grandkids, you know what I mean?

You always want to break away from your parents, and you always think, 'I'm never going to be like that guy.' What I've discovered is you kind of wind up becoming your parents, which is also a cliche in itself. My father, despite the fact that he's been dead for over 25 years, he's been a huge influence on me.

I believe firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.

I've felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father's family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.

Lord of myself, accountable to none, but to my conscience, and my God alone.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

There are secrets in families. That is the definition of a family.

Charles Manson ate apples. That doesn't mean I'm not going to.

Every backstory involves my father. I remember hearing Gary Oldman talking about backstories and saying, 'I got to stop using my father...' And I feel the same way. I don't know. What I come up with always involves some element of this son trying to prove himself to his father.

I am the younger version of my father. I try to be as normal as I can.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

Family relationships are just so fascinating - how they shape you as a person, how you can wound each other, how you're imprinted in a way by your family and the conditions under which you grow up.

In one way or another, everybody has this experience in their lives... the moment when you have to define your relationship to family and how your family's made you who you are, whether you've spent your life running from your family or deeply connected to your family.

While I loved my family, I would always have this association with my father. I would always be coming up against that conservatism. It was just liberating to be in London.

God could have created us to be automatons who were always choosing the right side, making the right decision. It is an incredible thing, God said "I want persons" who therefore have freedom.

I think when you grow up living next to your grandparents and cousins and you're 300 meters from the family offices and the setting of your after-school games is the fashion atelier, it can be hard to see yourself as an individual. It's quite understandable that a young person might feel the need to prove themselves as a single entity first.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

By right, as the word is employed in this subject, has always been understood discretion, that is, a full and complete power of either doing a thing or omitting it, without the person's becoming liable to animadversion or censure from another, that is, in other words, without his incurring any degree of turpitude or guilt. Now in this sense I affirm that man has no rights, no discretionary power whatever.

I don't believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.

I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead