Quotes About Self-discovery

Coming out, for me, was slightly painful. It was a relief, but it was also painful.

When I go out there untethered, the feelings that I slip I die totally overwhelms me. I am after the feeling of total control. I'm after that in all of life, and for now that's how I find it.

In a very slow way, I found my path. Even now, I think, 'If I can't do it my way, I'd rather not do it.'

The thing is: I was quite slow when I was younger. I might have been smart - I don't know - but I was slow talking to people. And as you can see, I don't talk very loud.

I was so comfortable with my ballet power, my dancer power, that to have a voice, the comfort with having a voice, is slower to come to me.

I just want to be myself. You learn from yourself, and that doesn't mean you have to drive slower; it actually means you have to drive faster, but maybe with a little bit in control, and that's what I learned.

I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences, and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really need it. There's nothing that I'm too scared to have a go at.

Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.

I'm slowly feeling more Chinese and feel I should be more proud of being Chinese and appreciate where I've come from.

It was never like I had to go, 'I am gay.' Slowly, almost by osmosis, by the way I was behaving, it became obvious and accepted.

I've slowly become more comfortable as an artist and as a person.

Zuri is slowly starting to become more of who I am in real life. Starting on 'Jessie,' she had a huge imagination, and had her imaginary friends, but now that she's 13 she has definitely passed that stage in her life and has grown so much.

When I was 18, I moved out of home. I decided to try to be an actor, so took myself off to slum it with nine humans and a million mice in a red Leytonstone house.

But I'm not an artist. Maybe an artist with a small a.

Getting injured gave me the opportunity to re-examine some small things like my serves.

My first job was television. I got to where I wanted to go, but through a little bit of a detour. When I first started working in film and television, I hated myself - I didn't like what I was doing at all. All I could think of was, 'I'm overacting. Be smaller.' I started to do that, but that was not fun. I felt confined doing film and TV.

Even if it's just the smallest thing, like what label I go by, I think to find the truth and express it with full confidence.

I wasn't smart enough to read relationship books when I was coming up. I learned everything the hard way.

When I was about eighteen, I saw myself as a rather sensitive, delicate, poetic, romantic figure. And then I got into the Civilian Conservation Corps and into the army, and I started smoking and drinking and being tough and getting muscles, and I had a whole different image of myself.

When I first moved to Austin in January of 2000, I went out drinking and smoking every single night for a year. And it was really fun at first, but then I started to feel kind of weird because, before I moved here, I had a vision of myself becoming a new person once I lived in Austin. I just hadn't realized that person might be Nick Nolte.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

Without appearing smug in any way, I would say I did not have a role model. I wish I had but I did not.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

Something really intense happened to me during the 'SNL' performance. It felt like the person I was made to be faced the person I'm becoming. It was the first time I felt like I was able to make any sense of ownership of my work.