Karyn Kusama Quotes

I really like watching myself a lot because it gives me an opportunity to see it from outside the flesh, and when I view it like that, I can be a lot more cynical and see the things that need to be attacked.

How do you tell a story that you're a part of without it being a big ego trip?

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

I learned a lesson which I didn't heed: Don't put yourself in your movies. It's too much.

I try not to be overly analytical.

I live my everyday life as a person, and I react to my photos from a certain distance. When I look at a photo, I detach myself and look at it as a product - not as me, Isabella.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

You cannot watch yourself dispassionately.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

When you reflect, you are able to put an experience into perspective... reflective thinking enables you to distance yourself from the intense emotions of particularly good or bad experiences and see them with fresh eyes.

Look directly into every mirror. Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story, and our story starts: We were here.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

I've been criticized for not having perspective in the past and I thought that of myself many times but not there.

You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.

'Downton Abbey' has become this huge thing, and I really enjoy the success of it, but I sometimes find myself on the outside looking in, which is sort of a healthy way to look at it so you don't get too caught up in it.

It's hard to understand the films that you're in, because you never truly get to see them.

I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

I hope I didn't bore you too much with my life story.

So I observe life a little bit, rather than participating in it.

I am not a librarian of my own work. It's a good thing not to be too involved with what you have done.