Julien Green Quotes

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

One day I actually took the list into the bathroom and I put it up against my face and looked in the mirror and I realized I had one of two choices, change the list or change myself.

I have never known a greater miracle, or monster, than myself.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

There was a period when I had a hard time reconciling all the different parts of me in a way that I thought would make sense to others.

I would say that playing this character has caused me to think about a lot of things. He's always questioning himself and trying to get back to something he lost touch with and trying to find forgiveness. Everybody struggles with these things to some extent in their life.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

Two people live within me. One's a very savvy businessperson; the other's a party girl.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

Can't get away from your own self.

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

I am my own heaven and hell!

I don't think I've made a mistake. I think I have behaved in ways that I am proud of; I think I've behaved in ways I'm not.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

My personality doesn't interest me.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that's not easy.

It is a true miracle when a man finally sees himself as his only opposition.