Quotes About Privacy

Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.

It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.

He'd often said that keeping things to himself was a matter of survival. Barracus had often told her that if she was doing something important she shouldn't tell people anything they didn't need to know. He lived his life by that rule. In fact, he often wouldn't tell Magda about things he thought she didn't need to know. Like why he killed himself.

I'm a witch. It's what we do. When it's nobody else's business, it's my business.

It's quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.

He'd forgotten the ancient wisdom: take care, when you are closely observing, that you are not closely observed.

The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it?

Not everything is meant for all to hear.

I will never be able to say what is in my heart, because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned. There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer...Each day I begin with the empty page.

In the dark of the moon there is growth. Plants do not flourish in the noonday sun, but rather in the privacy of the new moon

Not everything is meant for all to hear. Who can judge the intention of another?

Leaning against an oak tree for shade, I can't help but confront my own ignorance regarding these issues. I remember the grape boycott, but little else. It was not my struggle. That was my privilege. Now I see it differently. Acts of injustice undermine all of us. The privacy of hypocrisy is corrosive.

Every human on this earth had secrets.

Your blood reveal your most intimate secrets. Are you dying of leukimia or AIDS? Did you smoke cigarette or drink a glass of wine in the last few hours? Are you prozac because you're depressed, or Viagra because you can't get it up?

No one seems to have noticed that a loss of a sense of shame means a loss of privacy; a loss of privacy means a loss of intimacy; and a loss of intimacy means a loss of depth. There is, in fact, no better way to produce shallow and superficial people than to let them live their lives entirely in the open, without concealment of anything.

In many cases where one is content to lead a secluded life it is not necessary to say much of one's past, but as a rule something must be said. People have the habit of inquiring—if they are no more than butchers and bakers. By degrees one must account for this and that fact, and it was so here. .

I've kept a journal since I was 15. And I feel like it's been crucial to who I've become and trying to maintain stuff, a sense of who I am just for myself and not for other people.

Why would anyone ever tell anything personal to a journalist?

The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.

Once journalists have been rifling through your dustbins, you do try and keep them at arms' length.

I've been avoiding journalists my whole life.

I will not talk to journalists about anything that does not concern my work as a scientist or lecturer.

I don't go to journalists' houses and start dishing about anything private.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.