Rei Kawakubo Quotes

Growing up in postwar Japan has made me the person I am, but it is not why I do the work I do. It is a very personal thing - everything comes from inside.

The feeling of being an outsider, and the identity theme, are hardwired into me. If there's anything really autobiographical in my fiction, it's that feeling. I always feel that way.

I think creative blocks come from people's life journeys. If you don't know who you are or what you're about or what you believe in it's really pretty impossible to be creative.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

I think there's a huge parallel that affects my musical taste, and connections that have to do with my ethnic diversity and my musical tastes and the diversity of that. And it's interesting that, growing up on the circuit, it posed such a challenge, not only to me deciding what my identity was amongst my peers, but then on the music side, it was like trying to explain or convince people especially in the music industry that there was a place for what I was trying to do. But at the same time, I think it has a lot to do with timing and even me, like, understanding it.

How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!

Work for Swaraj fails to appeal to us because we have no music in us.

You do find a lot of your time in the West kind of searching for your place in the world - your voice, your identity, like, who am I? Like, what is my reason for being here, you know? And in that same way who am I to be partnered with, you know?

I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.

I attribute that to the generosity of people that are in the entertainment business because they are all struggling. All roads seem to come to acting, for certain kinds of people that have a reason for being there. They want to be seen and heard, but there's more to it than that. There's a kindred spirit of struggling to find out, "What is this thing? What are we?" It's those eternal questions. But, in the meanwhile, I've met some wonderful people doing this.

The reason people don't know what is good for them is because most people don't know what they are trying to do.

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

My starting point was the search for my identity in foreign places, in places where I am estranged from myself.

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

I have carried my Jamaican Flag with pride around the world to share my culture and experience with others because I seek Balance which is what I believe life is all about.

Never forget the essence of your spark!

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

Sometimes I think I spend my whole life trying to figure out where I fit in.

Did you get so caught up in the preoccupancy of a relationship that you lost who you were or were busy in life or career that you, like Adam and Eve, got lost in the garden putting fig leaf after fig leaf title, relationship, this accolade, this saying over you that you forgot who you were and what's life's about? So getting back to the core of that and building life by design, that is authentic.

I always tell people is really make sure you know why you want to do it. For me, I didnt make a conscious decision like "Oh I want to be a singer", it was like I grew up around it, I was singing because it was just natural for me to sing.

Remember your name. Do not lose hope ---what you seek will be found.

We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.

I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I am an actress.