Todd Haynes Quotes

How dull it is to have people defining you.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I don't want to live up to how people expect me to be.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them - you have to be like this or like that.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

Cultural background surely plays a part in shaping identity; but it does not determine identity.

My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

I'm not stereotypically Canadian. I don't really follow hockey. I don't feel like anything other than myself, basically.

At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

People are incapable of stereotyping you; you stereotype yourself because you're the one who accepts roles that put you in this rut or in this stereotype.

I refused to conform to an image that a lot of people thought a president's brother should adopt.

I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.

The idea is that in any situation, people have a notion as to who they are and how they should behave. And if you don't behave according to your identity, you pay a cost.

From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.

I don't feel like my films are about gender; they are about identity - but a different slant on identity.

It's Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it's human to do them.

People expect me to be that guy. But I'm more east London boy than east Baltimore.