Quotes About Individuality

You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.

I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.

When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone.

I am not... your Sakura

The guy I'm thinking of doesn't really look like me-not exactly. It's more that he looks like…like everyone…and no one…all at the same time. It's as if he let go of his true self…so he could play any part…be whomever someone else most desired him to be. I don't see how that could make anyone very happy.

Normal? What's normal? To only do what the masses do? And what is the benefit of that? Where is the problem in adopting a custom that is 'abnormal' if it has no negative effect on the world at large?

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

There are springs in the mind from which others cannot drink.

As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

You know why the gods made people in different colors? No, why Kate asked. Too boring, everybody looking the same. The gods didn't want us to get bored.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

Money lets you be who you really are.

I haven't even had a life I could call my own, and you're ready to slot me into the grand design. Well, I don't think I want to go. I want to be my own design.

She's...just a girl, you know. Like most girls: something and nothing.

My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers. He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.

I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

I have the normal complement of anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and whatever else - but I'm absolutely nothing special.

Minds weren't pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked Cunning, the next, Impressionable. They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.

I really believe that there is an enormous appetite amongst readers for an originality of vision. In other words, be true to your own dreams and there will always be people who want to hear them.

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.

She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn't young, she wasn't innocent, she didn't have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky.

Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don't you think?

What matters is there's something in you which is unique to you. And that's the only thing that matters. Not being the next Clive Barker, not being the next… whatever. What matters is being the next whoever you are. The only whoever you are. And - right or wrong - I'm the only Clive Barker.

So you can't please all the people all the time. All you can do is what pleases you, and hope that it pleases other people. I love my readers, and I respect my readers, but I'm not going to simplify or echo myself, copy myself, just so the sales will be better.