Quotes About Self-expression

You have to work in this business on your own terms. Don't sell out for money, fame, or notoriety.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

As far as developing a career as an actress, I think it's a fine balance between trying to just work, and also be true to yourself.

It's not that I don't want to become famous or that I'm obsessed by my work as an actress, but it's all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.

Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it's a lot easier to launch work that matters.

Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sometimes it's the only story you know how to tell.

If I didn't want to work for a couple of years I wouldn't have to - it's a great feeling, to know I'm doing it because I want to do it.

I might be shy, but in the field, where I have to do my work, I do it. I let my bat speak for myself.

If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work.

I paint as I want to with no holds barred. I am more contented lately than I have been for a long time about my work. But not dangerously so.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

I avoid falling into a trap of doing work solely to impress people. I always ask myself, "What don't I ever see?"

I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don't live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

I've had to work very hard, and I don't really have a category or fit into any niche, so each time I come out with a new record, it's like, I'm a new guy.

Just try to be yourself and resist complacency and ignorance. All you can do is work, work; work and be disciplined.

You have to take the basics of feminism and the kind of outline of it and do what you do with it. You have to make things work for your own life.

I've always known who I am. I might not work perfectly, or be like them, but that's okay. I know I work in my own way.

The biggest risk I've ever taken is going on American Idol and trying to be myself. I wasn't going to try too hard to conform, and I knew that it could possibly not work out.

People talk about generating my own work, but I don't really know how to go about that. There are certainly some roles in the theater I'd like to play but I don't know if I'll ever get to do it.

You have to be yourself, as models come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There are girls out there who are more voluptuous and they work better for different sorts of stories.

The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

My work is my way of expressing myself without being arrested.