Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness. 'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

Most of my world is in London, and I feel like this is where I went mad and ended up finding myself.

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.

That’s where the dreams end: with the realization that it doesn’t matter where I am, whether I think I’m a woman or a fish or something in-between. I’ve never really left the pond. I still can’t breathe.

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.

I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, 'Who am I?' And I wrote my first book to deal with that, 'The Ragman's Son.'

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

Probably the best thing that happened to me was going nuts. Nobody knew who I was until that happened.

Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by and obsessed with. My true self.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

I realized that I had screwed up my life living different parts of my life in different places. I wasn't whole. I wasn't integrated. I wasn't a complete person. And after that, came out, spent some time at a psychiatric hospital.

Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.

I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

It's hard to live in a blind and aimless - or dishonest, rather - narrative when somebody in your family is going farther toward - or at least think they are and say they are - their true self.

I think in the experience of growing up and realizing who you are, what your place in the world is can be quite scary.

Beijing was a huge slap in the face, and it forced me to look at myself. I have to realise that this is my life.

I don't know how happy I was when I met Sting. I always had this difficulty of not really knowing who I was.