Paul Schrader Quotes

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

Study what thou art Whereof thou art a part What thou knowest of this art This is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

I think 'Lost Boy' is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don't picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

To search for truth about self is as valuable as to search for truth in other areas of life.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

I think people come and go, 'I'm going to find the real Gary. What is it... the real Gary? I've got to find it.' But the thing is, it's pretty much what you see is what you get. I'm just like this. There's no hidden viciousness.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?

It's nice to take the gloves off, to really examine your character's desires and goals.

No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves.

Who am I, really? I prefer to leave that up to the observer, because I will never finish answering that.

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

As I learn more about myself, I think people learn more about me as well. It seems to correlate that way. I learn how to represent myself more as it goes on.