Quotes About Introspection

The name 'Light of Mine' came from how the album was conceived and what its purpose was in telling my story. I started making it at a time when I was, more or less, in a darker place than usual.

For me, a theatre is a dark place. It should be mysterious; it's where we go to get away from all the utilitarian things we do in the daylight.

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.

A few weeks ago I went to a screening of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' at Utopia. I'm not a very introspective person but when I get on that stage, it feels even more overwhelming than showing my films at the Cannes film festival. Because standing there, I'm so close to my past. I can see how far I've come.

Every nation, like every individual, would like to believe it owes 'no apology' to anyone. Adults realise, however, that few among us are purely innocent or utterly blameless.

I remember thinking, when I was playing Hedda Gabler, that several sequences of the play were utterly absurd.

And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

How do people who live utterly alone survive? There are so many things that won't open. I've got a few dresses in New York, and I can somehow get them on, but I can't get them off.

As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.

The human mind doesn't like a vacuum. We will populate that vacuum with the contents of our own head, and often that's scary stuff.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like.

Honestly, I feel you are poisoned if you read too much of the scientific literature because it makes you start thinking like other people. You're better off having a vague sense of what's going on and making your own way.

My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

I absolutely do not think that I have even a vague recollection of what normal life is like.

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

I'm not vain, I'm insecure.

The joke I always make about myself is that I'm self-involved, but I'm not vain.

I don't get self-conscious. I'm not vain in that way.

It's so rare, actors who are not vain.

I'm as vain as the next person, but I've made so much fun of myself over the years, and that's very salutary as you grow older.