Natalie Portman Quotes

I think you can decide how much of yourself you're willing to make public.

Sometimes I like to think it would be nice if you just had a character, and your personal life was your personal life. My life is definitely out there, you know?

I have a passionate desire for personal privacy. I want to stand before the world, for good or bad, on the book I wrote, not on what I say in letters to friends, not on my husband and my home life, the way I dress, my likes and dislikes, et cetera. My book belongs to anyone who has the price, but nothing of me belongs to the public.

There will always be a slight difference between the reel and the real. Even my family might know 99 per cent about me, but there will be this one per cent about me that nobody will ever know. Being in this profession, I am fine with biopics or movies inspired by real-life-characters.

I'm just not a private person. It's not like I do things because I want things to be public; it's just that's my way of expressing myself, and I happen to be very famous.

People who don't know me, how will they know what I am really like? They will only see me on the field, only see me in an advertisement. People who know what kind of a guy I am will tell you I'm a very open person.

I have no control whatsoever on how people perceive me from the Right or the Left. All I have control over is who I say I am.

I'd like people to get a sense of who I am, yet I want to keep my privacy, too.

I try not to define myself. Other people are going to do that for you anyway.

You can't ever put your self-definition in the hands of somebody who meets you for 15 minutes.

It's one of the hardest things in life - choosing your own name.

I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. I'm worth more than that.

I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.

I am not going to share my private life with millions of people. I don't find a need to do that and nobody else close to me does either.

My show is my statement. What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?

I want to be remembered as the football player I was. The private person is nobody's business.

I don't think a lot of people know personally who I am.

The only person that can define you is you. Nobody else can.

I am a public figure, but I am not public property.

I think people kind of know me, although I am pretty private when it comes to my private life.

I don't want to be the person who has the gigantic headlines: 'Look Who So-and-So Is Dating Now.' That, to me, isn't really who I am.

People need to differentiate me from my roles.

You have to be your own person. You can't let people's opinions determine how you think about yourself. There's a difference between identity and self-identity.

The question of what we are can only be answered by ourselves. We each decide what we are by the life choices we make. How we were made, who are parents are, where we are from, the color of our skin, who we choose to love, all those things do not define us. Our actions define us, and will keep defining us until even after death.

I'm so grateful that I had the luxury of transitioning in private. Because when you transition in the public eye, the transition becomes the story.