Richard Quest Quotes

I have a fear of labels. If someone labels me, I have to respond - do I acknowledge it, reject it, deny it, live up to it, and defy it? Labels can affect your ability to be yourself. If you're not careful, like I wasn't when I was young, that can take a toll on you. You find yourself conforming to everyone else's ideas of who you are.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

I don't believe we have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time.

I don't like it when people who are young act like they're 40. That's taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you're so mature or whatever - I don't try to act mature. Some people might say I'm mature for my age, but it's not something I'm trying to do, you know? I'm just me.

There's a constant anxiety that comes from having an innate sense of self, yet existing within a homogenised, aspirational culture.

It's lame to say that I'm a normal girl, but I think I am.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

I've got a wonky nose. Is it classical, is it not? That's what's hard work, getting down into the nitty-gritty of who are the human beings behind the front of what they present?

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

I seem to disappoint people a bit. They want the full regalia - but I don't walk around in a corset the whole time.

The idea is that in any situation, people have a notion as to who they are and how they should behave. And if you don't behave according to your identity, you pay a cost.

I don't know what 'normal' means, anyway.

Whenever you see people talking about how real they are or how normal they are, it seems odd to have that self awareness that you could potentially not be normal.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Get to know the real you, rather than try to look like or dress like those around you.

I think it really holds you back having to think about your image.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

If you go out to Hollywood you'll find a lot of fantastic plastic people there in the business and a lot of people in life generally. They find it so hard to be themselves that they have to be plastic.

A lot of people go through life trying to perform normalcy, and I think you can relate to that.

We're all weirdos, and people want to work so hard to fit into society, but it's like, no matter what you do, you're never going to be what society depicts as what's perfect, because that's not real. The only point that you have to make is that 'I'm being me.'

I'm not cutting my hair because I'm not going to be fake.

We're living at this funny time, where we're all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It's easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.

You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in.

Seems like a lot of my generation as a whole is more concerned with being the cool kid; sarcastic, smug, or just all together impenetrable. So anyway, it's not always comfortable to be like, the dorky, happy girl at the party... but that's me.

What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.