Quotes by Women Directors

Rita Hayworth

Marguerite Duras

Liv Ullmann

Goldie Hawn

Traci Lords

Kathryn Bigelow

Julie Taymor

Lee's great gifts are teaching and inspirational guidance, not administration and management.

Cheryl Crawford

The wonderful thing about films is how they can be understood by so many different people on so many different levels.

Lina Wertmüller

Nourishing yourself in a way that helps you blossom in the direction you want to go is attainable, and you are worth the effort.

Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.

Jenny Erpenbeck

Christian said he'd call the next day, but in boy time that meant Thursday.

I am that twentieth-century failure, a happy undersexed celibate.

The line between seduction and prostitution is very blurred, and deep down, everyone knows it.

Virginie Despentes

One's lifework... grows with the working and the living. Do it as if your life depended on it, and the first thing you know, you'll have made a life of it.

Theresa Helburn

When anything becomes the fashion, that's the time to put a bomb under it.

Joan Littlewood

I have become post facto a representative of the country. So if you ask, "Is Mermaids a Canadian film?" — it has become one. It has become a means whereby people characterize Canadian film. I think in the creation of Mermaids, I did see it in political terms. I thought of the underdog. Canada is not a superpower by any means. It's very quietly, comfortably democratic, but it's plagued by a sense of inferiority.

Patricia Rozema

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one's own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery—much like a wobbly toddler or an unhinged politician, one immediately looks for someone else to blame. God. Your parents. Ex-girlfriends. Undocumented immigrants. Marvin in Human Resources. China.

I've been called a termagent, but people BELIEVE in me. I'm a BIG personality.

Taubie Kushlick

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

Melissa Gilbert

I look at my roommates who are so proud of me that it makes me proud.

Adriana Trigiani

In 2004, I joined my father, John Kerry, on the trail in his bid for the United States presidency.

Alexandra Kerry

We want to make things. We want to make things with our hands. We crave it. It sparks something in us, feeds our urge to create. That's why were here.
The future will be what we choose to build. We choose to build what we believe in. It's always been that way. A small group of people choose to believe in something, and then they make it so. In that order. They choose to believe in something, and then they make it so. That's the power of makers — the power to choose a new future, by believing, and making.

Regina E. Dugan

Human needs to go through the abyss of pains and loss, because the more we suffer-the better.

The reduction of poverty is the over-arching objective of the MDGs. Progress is not measured by national or global averages, but by how well the health of the poor improves. If we miss the poor, we miss the point. A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact.

Letting go of someone we love is the hardest thing we will ever do. Some people never surrender to love for the fear of being hurt. But to not have loved, to not have felt the immense joy it brings, would have been a far worse kind of death.

Films don't cause violence, people do. Violence defines our existence. To shield oneself is more dangerous than trying to reflect it.

Kathryn Bigelow

I am learning that if I just go on accepting the framework for life that others have given me, if I fail to make my own choices, the reason for my life will be missing. I will be unable to recognize that which I have the power to change.

She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality.
I find that I make as an artist the kind of choices that I have to be impassioned about. I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself. That's a difference.
Frida painted her own reality, her life. I'm a director and I paint many other people... Other people's realities. But I do have to invest in it.

And there is something great about knowing that my only job is to be as happy as I can be about my life, and feel as good as I can about myself, and to lead as full and eventful a life as I can, so that it doesn't ever feel like I'm just waiting around for some guy to ask me out. And most importantly, it's good for us all to remember that we don't need to scheme and plot and beg to get someone to ask us out. We're fantastic.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.

Marguerite Duras

Just because I was married to Aly Khan, people think I'm rich. Well, I'm not. I never got a dime from Aly or from any of my husbands.