Steven Soderbergh Quotes

You're young and you're always in pursuit your young manhood. You're trying to figure out - what does that mean? What does - you know, there's a lot of pressure on young men to sort that out. And, you know, we tend to gravitate towards one-dimensional iconography as far as what it means to be a fully grown man. And you can get lost in so much of it out there.

I want to figure out myself as a man.

I had a difficult time hearing my own inner voice about what I wanted to be in this life, because there were all these perfect examples of what a man actually does. The notion is that he goes to college, gets married and provides. That's what a man does.

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.

It's not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?"

Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search--for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.

How can I be a man if there is no role model?

I'm a fashion designer. I don't want to be defined as someone's girlfriend.

'I Am Number Four' is a great story about a guy who's trying to find his destiny and figure out who he is and his identity.

I live, like every real man, in my work.

Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is.

I always try to bring a certain masculine presence to what I do. That is part of the dynamic.

I don't know what I am. And it's not important.

If I'm not a successful human being, who I am?

At some point, when I finished school in Zurich, I suddenly realised that I was nobody. I couldn't find a shape. Everything I was had been invented. Initially, I took it to be a fundamental conflict. But today I find pleasure in accepting that this thing called 'identity' is the true invention. There's no way that it really exists.

In the past I'd always felt like 'the girl' in the show or the movie. On 'Friday Night Lights' there were a bunch of girls, and I was the woman. Initially there was a little struggle with my identity around that. But now there's a sense of ease.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

A woman simply is, but a man must become.

I've never, ever labeled myself.

If only I could change my destiny and be a man, …

The person I am is who I am. My life is my career, my career is my life.

Someone once asked me if I was gay. I said, 'Do you think a three-letter word defines the complexity of my humanity?' I avoid the trap of easy definition.

The one consistent character in all of this is Chelsea Green, and that's how people know me, even as all else changes. I can go out and be the hot mess, or go hard in matches or be silly, and that's still all me.

I guess I just do being a man different than some.