Quotes About Introspection

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did? He committed suicide!

I wanted to be an academic when I was 19 or 20. But, I've gone off that idea. The lifestyle is kind of lonely and isolated. I don't think that would suit me.

It doesn't suit me as a person to be put on public display.

Every now and then, when I think about it, I think, 'What would I even talk about onstage?' It's never been, 'I wonder if I'm funny. I wonder if I can come up with jokes.' It's more, 'What would it be like without the leather suit and the anger?'

Self-promotion is not my strong suit, for sure. I don't look down on it; I just don't understand how to do it.

In your 40s, you kind of know how things are likely to go, and you're better at saying, 'You know what? That just doesn't suit me...' I remember thinking in my 30s, 'I should go to Burning Man. I could be a Burning Man person.' And in my 40s, I'm like, 'You know what? I'm never going to go to Burning Man.'

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

I was suited for fame, and I mean that in the most non-egocentric way. I don't mind gearing my life towards privacy. It's my nature.

I'm creative in my own life. I'm creative when I step out the door. I'm creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I'm one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.

Maybe I'm more suited to making small independent films.

I walk slowly into myself, through a forest of empty suits of armor.

Modesty isn't one of my strong suits.

A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.

I only pray when it suits my own needs. I'm not proud about that.

Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.

It's really odd that I've got this kind of sullen reputation - I never saw myself that way.

Through my films I'm eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don't know if I'm ever going to get there, but I'm slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I'm 85, I'll look back and say, 'All right, that about sums it up.'

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

Normally I begin writing a song with just with aim to express something, and sometimes I don't know what I want to express until a sentence comes to my head that will sum up everything about how I'm feeling at the time.

Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.

I've always been a slow starter. My first date was with a girl called Cessi. We had a beautiful relationship over the phone all summer, and then when we met, I couldn't look her in the eye.

Once you have conquered your profession and are standing at the summit, it is all very well to look back down the slope and indulge yourself with regrets.

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.