Eleanor Catton Quotes

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

What works for a man, still does not work for a woman - both in terms of how they see themselves and how we see them.

I think feeling responsible for stuff that goes wrong is an inherent part of being female.

When I was younger, I felt very much like, 'Oh, I have to be a certain way, I have to look a certain way.' You really, really don't. That's the way women are treated differently than men. I mean, I've had actors argue with me about this.

I know, for me, that I have always been very conscious of how I dress when I go to the studio, I'm very conscious of my body language when I'm working - a lot of times, I'm the only female in the room. It's a very male-dominated profession. I'm always around guys. Guys are going to try you all day, and they're going to flirt all day.

I think there are a lot of rules for women. We have a lot of expectations and a lot of rules for women. So we're expected to march in a straight line, and when we don't, all hell breaks loose.

When a woman is very, very bad, she is awful, but when a man is correspondingly good, he is weird.

Women are the harshest critics of other women.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

When I started out, there were three things that made film people look at me with condescension, I was young, I was black, and I was female. I have won a certain respect, but I think the film community still sees directing as a male job.

I have friends who have daughters and there's times I think I'm glad I have boys instead of girls.

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

There are some professions that culturally and sociologically take a long time to change, and because of that, there's still sexism in comedy audiences. We shouldn't blame them: I do it too. A woman comes on, and I feel slightly anxious. I'm a woman in comedy, and I do that; I think everyone does.

In a lot of TV shows out there, the women are the weak ones, and the men are the strong ones.

I hate when I get asked, 'What's it like to be a woman in comics?'

Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?'

In popular culture, when women compete, it's usually over a man, and it's usually very nasty. And that is just frankly not my experience. That's just some kind of popular mythology, it feels like. I find it insulting.

There's a remarkable amount of sexism on TV. When male characters are flawed, they're interesting, deep and complex. But when female characters are flawed, they're just a mess. It's good to put more flawed but interesting female characters out there because it promotes equality.

I'm interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there's still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.

The thing I will say is that probably culturally, women are treated differently, which means, I think, you're criticized more, you have to listen a little bit more, you have to justify yourself.

Women are often expected to be more amiable or more pleasing or more submissive than men generally.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.