Atom Egoyan Quotes

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

My mother has a very big family in Shanghai, so I have, like, almost 40 cousins, so we stayed together all the time. So by the time I get to Hong Kong, I become the only child and the only one surrounded by adults, you know.

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.

It's so easy for me to fall back into depression. I think it comes with having money. I don't have to work. I could be sitting bored and depressed at home with a bag on my head.

Early on, I played one or two disturbed people, and I guess I must have been good at it, because it stuck. But, you know, I'm a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way.

My first job was in a nursing home - a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me.

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

I relate to most of the characters I play, because I do feel like an outsider.

When everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

You get older and you see yourself and say, 'God, he's old, who's that?'

My wife has joked that if anything ever happened to me, she'd gladly live out her life without anyone else around. I think it bugs her I'm home all the time; such is the life cycle of the cartoonist, however.

I think that, on television and in film, I will continue to be the mother to hot boys until, inevitably, I am their grandmother.

I'm nobody, who are you?

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

When a man is extremely lonely, he starts discovering himself.

As we grow up, either we lose people or have a lot of them around us. I have seen many people who are isolated in their old age.

I was quite a different child, I felt isolated. In time, that level of being with yourself crystallises who you are, and you can see what other people are without being blinded by what they want from you.

When we are away from home, our only constant companion is our self.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.