Karyn Kusama Quotes

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

There is a thing about women that needs to be understood. We don't sit well with being put in a certain place.

I grew up in an era where you had to find your own way as a woman. When I was a kid, there was this whole physical and emotional neatness and purity that a woman was supposed to have, and I didn't fit into that.

Women are allowed to exist in this very narrow lane, but as soon as you step out of that lane, people want to stone you.

Our culture has created two almost irreconcilable descriptions of a 'good woman.' The first is the individual achiever; the second, the self-sacrificing domestic goddess.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

People want to put women in one box, and I'm interested in how women can be everything at once.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.

I started to think of Grace of Monaco as a metaphor for women in general.

The problem is, women have stopped setting the bar high.

We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home; that a woman should not aspire to achieve more than her male counterparts and, particularly, not more than her husband.

Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.

There's nothing wrong at all with women wanting to be women.

I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.

As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

We try to do too many things that used to be in the men's domain, and we try to do them like men's. I'm a prude - I guess you can tell that - but I think, 'Why would you do that?'

There's this whole feeling that women should be small and quiet and polite, and I don't think that's really gotten us anywhere.

The character I've created, Christine, is mainly the first attempt for me to escape all the secret injunctions we have as girls all the time. Like, be pretty but be polite. Don't take too much space. All those things that didn't mean anything to me. I just decided to turn them around with my character.

I just assumed that if you were a girl-child, you were supposed to grow up and write.

Always I remember when I am young, I ask my mother, 'I really want to be a dress designer.' In that time, was quite difficult because, you know, my family always criticize me for it not to be a man's job.

It's hard for women every single day; we have to be nice, but not too nice, ambitious, but not too ambitious. It puts a lot of pressure on what we should and can be.