Diana Rigg Quotes

I'm very shocked when I look at television and I see such an aggressive youth and image obsession in the representation of women on our screens.

Respectability? Who wants to be respectable? That's spoken like a true loser.

As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.

I'm very conditioned by my surroundings, by the influences of social media, by the television I watch. And I always found, growing up, that even inspiring female characters or complex female characters in television and film, I often found that their complexity was actually just another facet of their sexuality.

I grew up in Tennessee, and if you didn't play football, you were a sissy. I got slurs all the time because I was in music and art...I was an outcast in a lot of ways...but everything that you get picked on for or you feel makes you weird is essentially what's going to make you sexy as an adult.

Everyone is being told by society to talk this way, to dress that way, to be this person or to be that person, and it's so important to just maintain a sense of self.

I'm not your cookie-cutter athlete, and that scares people. People don't know how to take that.

I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.

You can't be a punk all your life.

I think there are some people who have this thing where, from the very beginning, some part of them rejects convention.

I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.

I never feel confined by gender, by labels, by expectations, by stereotypes. I'm free to be myself.

There's not a lot of positive role models of women in newspapers and magazines. I think it puts pressure on girls. They think that the image put out, it's the way you have to look.

I've never given a damn. A seven-foot man who dresses as a woman as a job is not interested in what other people think.

The images you see in media are vital to impacting not just what the world sees in terms of who can be a computer scientist, who can be techie, who can be a geek or who can be a creator; it also impacts the girls and what they internalize.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

I didn't do anything with the thought that I want to go against society or bend any rules.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed.

It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism.

Everybody doesn't have to have a daughter who's a goodie-two-shoes.

I remember hearing once that good girls don't get caught. I think that's sort of a lot of what my teen years were like.

The reason they want you to fit in... is that once you do, then they can ignore you.