societal judgment Quotes

I make movies for teenage boys. Oh dear, what a crime.

After having your first child, it's a massive shock to the system. I work in an industry where people judge you and the way you look, and you always want to put your best foot forward when you can.

Do you want me crucified for my profanity?

What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.

When I was first pregnant, which was, let's see, in nineteen-eighty-three - I remember wearing a regular bathing suit to my in-laws' pool. It was just like a spandex one-piece, completely modest, and yet people were looking at me like it was obscene.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

People who don't like me talk about it as though I'm trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it's 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren't limited to sailors. It's a form of art I find beautiful. I love it.

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

What I hated then - and hate now - is the way that people say to girls like me who get pregnant young that it ruins your life. Having a child doesn't ruin your life - having a child is a blessing.

If anybody wants to engage in any kind of sexual activity with any consenting partner, that is their business. I don't feel that I can sit in judgment on them, or that society can sit in judgment on them. Anybody can do anything they damn well please, as long as the relationship isn't exploitive. And I don't feel that legality should have anything to do with it.

There’s a belief that something’s wrong if you don’t have what other people have—that it’s because you’re ‘disadvantaged.’ A teenage dropout mother is told she has a disadvantage. But if you’re going to call the negative consequences of chosen behavior ‘disadvantage,’ the word is corrupt beyond repair and useful only for propaganda purposes.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

Most women who have done something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.

Normal people think I'm insane.

Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

People think if you look after yourself you're being selfish, you know.

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.

I was called a terrorist yesterday... Today I am admired by the very people who said I was one.

The evil that we do does not attract to us so much persecution and hatred as our good qualities.

If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.