Sam Neill Quotes

When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.

I couldn't say my own name when I was 12.

I'm pretty shy when I go home because I was pretty shy growing up, and I think I go back to that person.

At school, I felt out of place. I was bullied. I would think, 'These kids don't like me, they don't accept me,' but I felt like in the entertainment industry, I would fit in.

I think that being in the closet is really hard. It takes a toll on your mind. It takes a toll on you. I think it just makes every aspect of your life more difficult.

There's a tremendous sense of shame that people who are lonely feel. I say that as someone who felt ashamed of being lonely as a child and even at points during adulthood.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

There are people who view their feminism in different ways. I used to beat myself up if I didn't react to things like I was supposed to.

People don't like talking about it, but if you're Spanish, you feel a weight.

Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

It's not your fault. You had no way of knowing I'd traded my soul. It's not exactly how I start out conversations. Hi, I'm Kyrian. I have no soul. What about you? (Kyrian)

Shyness is a condition foreign to the heart - a category, a dimension which leads to loneliness.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

I was stuck in the feeling that one did not--was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am.

Sometimes I think that people's characters get forged, at least in part, from their names.

I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I felt I could only be myself when I was alone, that I turned into some kind of novelty. The only way I could get through that time was to drink. I poisoned myself with alcohol for years but I've never been into drugs in the way it was sometimes made out.

I feel like 'embattled' or 'disgraced' will always follow my name. It's like that black football player who recently came out.

Can't get away from your own self.

My name, I have spent my whole life trying to make that name mean something. And now it's gone.

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it

I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

*We give so little when it's in us always to give so much more. It's bothering to listen with an open heart to someone who smells bad. It's hard.

I feel like you constantly have to prove why you deserve to continue to exist.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.