Taika Waititi Quotes

There are stories I wanted to tell, and they are not defined by what I look like.

No matter how widely spread out the films are, how different, you still are you.

Hima is Hima only. I haven't changed.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

You have to be someone.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.

Yeah, it's nice to look up to people, but the more you try to be somebody else, the less you are of yourself.

The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.

My father's music was influential. My place is my place. I must be myself and who I am.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

I think that you can't help but bring pieces of who you are. No matter what you do, it comes through you as a vessel.

I like to tell my own story using my personality and my insight, the way I see things.

A lot of my songs are about things that concern me personally, not a heightened version of myself or any of the characters that I play.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.

The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.

It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can.

What makes a girl a girl? What makes a guy a guy? Do you have to be what they want you to be? Or do you stop and listen to that voice inside you? I know who I am. I'm Petra West. And I'm a girl. You want me to sleep somewhere else, fine. Whatever. But I'm not going to pretend to be somebody I'm not. I've done enough of that.