Diane Keaton Quotes

It hadn't been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she'd been an altogether different person back then.

I don't even know who that person was in the '80s. I see pictures of myself from back then and I don't even recognize myself.

I tend not to look back on old clips of myself or look at things I wrote or listen to something from the radio 30 years ago: I remember them, but it feels like someone else.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

It's easy for me to say that now, now I'm a father, I've got a four-and-a-half year old boy, I'm a different person. Well, I'm still the same person, but I'm different.

People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

I used to be.

I look at old pictures of me... and I don't feel like I'm that guy anymore, but then I look at pictures of me now, and I'm not quite sure I'm this guy.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

I think your ambition for something changes as you go.

When I think about myself at 15, I can't relate to myself at all. I thought I knew everything.

Thankfully I've been quite lucky in my career, but it's always good to re-evaluate things and think about what else you want to do.

I think through living one's life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It's a trick of thought.

I can remember how I sang - a little more nasal-y back then. Listening to those old recordings is like seeing a photograph of yourself from 10 years ago. You're wearing what you thought looked cool at the time. You had your hair styled the particular way you thought looked cool. It's an accurate depiction of who you were and what you looked and sounded like at that point in your life. It doesn't necessarily mean that it aged in a way that it feels as cool or sounds as good to you, or says what you thought it said, 10 years later. That's just the nature of growing older.

I think some people are really connected to who they were as children. And some people aren't.

When that much time goes by, you're really listening to your old music differently. At the time it's written, it was the beginning of our career and with every song we're thinking, 'This is what's creating us.' Now, nothing is creating us. We're well-created. We're there. It becomes just pure pleasure and you become sort of an archeologist of your own music. You don't judge it, because what's the point? It's a 30-year-old song. It just becomes fun.

...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.

I used to be someone.

Once you do something that people respond to, they understandably think of you in that way, and you want to work and it's fun and it's wonderful. I think a lot of people in all different fields find themselves in a moment of repeating certain beats. There's also a moment that is personally related to age as well - in whatever field you're in, you say, "Wait a minute, where am I and how did I get here? How has this changed from my original intent and what do I want to do about that now?" That's part of the process.

How I imagined myself being 50 is not how I am feeling now. You think you'll be different, but I still feel like I am about 12 years old - mentally, not physically.

When people say you're going to be so different at 22 or 23, when you're 16, you're like, I'm so not! And then you change drastically.

I think the first thing is to recognize that there is an ebb and flow to your career. There are going to be moments that are really high, and then you're going to have moments where you step away for a little bit, and maybe that's just by choice or maybe you have a family.

I'm older than I was before when I was young.

I no longer think in terms of, Ooh, this is a great role and what is it going to do for - actually, I've never really thought about what something is going to do for my career.

I used to think that I wouldn't change anything from my past, because doing so would inevitably affect who I am now. But considering my current state, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to go back in time to fix things.