Will Arnett Quotes

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

As I traveled from one country to another, no one knew anything about me. So I could be anybody, I could speak as I wished, act as I wished, dress as I wished.

When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

I thought if I went somewhere where I didn't know anybody and they didn't know me I could start all over again.

Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

I think we all wear some kind of mask. There are masks that shield us from others, but there are masks that embolden us, and you see that in carnival. The shiest child puts on a mask and can do anything and be anybody.

To be able to pretend to be something that I'm frankly not is very liberating and exciting.

Part of the very impulse of writing for me is actually wanting to get away from myself.

Music is supposed to be an escape. It's supposed to be somewhere you go, where you can be yourself, or be whatever you want to be.

I think we were just coming out and being ourselves, instead of operating within boundaries that other people had created. We decided to do away with those boundaries.

I need this wild life, this freedom.

I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.

I'm a free spirit; more people should become free spirits.

I'm not interested in who am I. I'm interested in what's gone, the disinheritance, what I've been able to become or learn or fuse with or not fuse with. A certain freedom comes... I like it that way.

I love the ability to transform because that, for me, is a liberation.

When I sing I don't feel like it's me. I feel I am fabulous, like I'm 10 feet tall. I am the greatest. I am the strongest. I am Samson. I'm whoever I want to be.

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

I've left Bethlehem, and I feel free. I've left the girl I was supposed to be, and some day I'll be born.

I feel like I've been known for having long black hair, so when I took all my extensions out and cut my own hair, it was the most freeing thing, I think, I've ever done. That was my 21st year: I cut my hair, I was doing Broadway; I was living in New York, and I was really having a moment of becoming my individual self, and it was amazing.

When you drive, you can kind of put your identity aside in the passenger's seat because you're not being watched, and you can just be the watcher.

For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write, I'm not a woman. I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself, and I can reinvent the world.

You're supported by everything in New York if you want to be a performing artist. You come here, you can change your name. You leave home, you come here, you're severed from family obligations - the old identity drops away as soon as you come to New York because you're coming to New York, if you're an artist, to be someone else.

The great thing about being a woman is the power of reinvention.