To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.
I didn't have boyfriends until my late teens. I was at a girls' boarding school, and my stepfather disapproved of me going out with anybody. I never really came across any boys. When I did, one of them asked me out, and I was petrified. I felt like a fish out of water, and it was excruciating.
We were segregated throughout the community, and it was pretty brutal, actually. It didn't appear to be, on the surface.People got along and we had great relationships, but there was discrimination that impacted adversely the ability of the African-American community to progress. People did not - were in denial about that fact.
Channel 4 are a great bunch of people to work with and the crew are lovely. Working at ITV was like being in the court of Caligula.
There was no place at all for me in my father's military world.
I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.
The idea that the family is this locus of support but can also hold you back and keep you down makes for good drama.
To me, when you're at a hotel, and your home environment is ultimately dictated by somebody else, I always find that a little bit oppressive and scary in a way. Especially if it's not done well or not run well.
It started off really…claustrophobic. I feel like I was really really protected. Really guarded with myself. I feel like they [Def Jam] were giving me the blueprint and I couldn’t get with that
Worse than the ordinary, miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.
Kansas is very religious, very Republican, and very straight-laced. I needed to get away from that.
That's what 'Hell On Earth' was about: we felt that we were living in hell.
There was a strange atmosphere on the set because we were filming in this large house, which was used for troubled children. You'd go in and find walls had been burnt down. The building was charged with this history and it stayed with us throughout the filming.
When young people grow up with fear as the norm, they don't have the luxury to dream.
You see another side of Draco when he's with his dad. When Draco is with his dad, he doesn't say anything. He keeps his mouth shut. He's sort of bullied by his dad, so he acts very different.
Mordovian prisoners are afraid of their own shadows. They are completely terrified.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.
Hell is being trapped in a night-club with the'beautiful people'and forced to live in a'luxury penthouse flat'.
My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.
I don't think I could be happy as an actor if there was a tyrant on the set.
Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.
The parent-child relationship in the home usually reflects the objective cultural conditions of the surrounding social structure. If the conditions which penetrate the home are authoritarian, rigid, and dominating, the home will increase the climate of oppression. As these authoritarian relations between parents and children intensify, children in their infancy increasingly internalize the paternal authority.
I remember playing for coaches who seemed like military-type guys. It always rubbed me the wrong way.
England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.
