Jodie Foster quotes: her thoughts on weaklings, escaping through books, surviving stardom as a child, why fame can go f*ck itself, and more.
“There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. And wouldn’t you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become. This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders or your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more every day.”
“Let how you live your life stand for something, no matter how small and incidental it may seem.”
“Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from.”
“Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.”
“All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn’t matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn’t. There is something kind of refreshing about that.”
“When you make a bold choice, you’re always having to fight for it.”
“If I fail, at least I will have failed my way.”
“We think, ‘If I have more money, I am more valuable. If I make more money, I am more valuable.’ It’s all sort of wound up with this problem that humans have with their failure.”
“In the end, winning is sleeping better.”
“I want to change the system from within the system. And that means focusing and specializing.”
“Eventually this all passes. The public horrors of today eventually blow away. And, yes, you are changed by the awful wake of reckoning they leave behind. Hopefully in the process you don’t lose your ability to throw your arms in the air again and spin in wild abandon. That is the ultimate F.U. and – finally – the most beautiful survival tool of all. Don’t let them take that away from you.”
“I feel at various times in my life that I’ve been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity.”
“I think ‘destiny’ is just a fancy word for a psychological ‘pattern.'”
“I think there is something to being curious about your choices, but not wanting to kind of pierce the bubble of them, because it takes away from the act of discovering.”
“It’s a skill that people are born with. Either you’re a focuser or you’re a multi-tasky person. I am a full-focus person.”
“I was raised with a single mom and we had a very specific, very particular relationship. She worked with me and my job. I was almost three and we traveled everywhere together and she was really in my life in a really profound way. The most significant relationship of my life. It was beautiful and also an incredible, difficult struggle. I know how creative that life is, and how difficult it is to figure it out.”
“I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.”
“I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.”
“Being an artist is a way of saying, ‘I am here, and this is what I stand for.'”
“In a weird way, that’s the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you’re afraid of, and you get to say, ‘Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.’ It’s kind of a way of exorcising fear.”
“I’ve always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better, not worse.”
“The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.”
“I aspire to be able to appreciate and review a director based on their accomplishments and based on who they are and what they bring to the material, regardless of their gender.”
“I was never interested in a career for a career’s sake. I just wanted to tell the stories I find interesting… I just worked when I found something that moved me.”
“People say as a woman actor your career is over at 40. But then they told me I would never work again after I was 16.”
“I don’t need to be Tom Cruise. I just need to work forever.”
“I’d always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren’t famous.”
“I don’t think there is anything good about fame. ‘Tables in restaurants.’ People say that but, then again, why don’t you just call the day before? Or go eat somewhere else?”
“I love the way L.A. leaves you alone. I can go home, read all day, and nobody bugs me.”
“My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I’m always on time – or early.”
“Books have always been my escape – where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing. Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry. When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn’t feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.”
“I read more than I do anything else, probably. I read about three books a week.”
“Being twenty-something is all about taking it in: eating it, drinking it and spitting out the seeds later. It’s about being fearless, and stupid, and dangerous, and unfocused, and abandoned. It’s about being in it, not on top of it.”
“I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your 30s and so that’s kind of a natural progression. But I’m definitely drawn to it. It’s probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.”
“I also feel like I’ve learned over the years what is not important, and that is also great: to know what is pointless to spend your energy on, to be more specific.”
“Look, it’s terrible, I know, but weakness really, really bugs me, to the point that if there is a wounded bird on the sidewalk, I look at it and I go: I think I’ll just kick it.”
“I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age.”
“You guys might be surprised, but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child.”
“I think you’re just born with a certain personality and some people might want to be astronauts and no matter how good they are at flying they can’t handle the zero gravity. I feel like I was blessed with a strength of character that keeps me intact. Although there are definitely parts of me that are crazy.”
“I feel a kind of freedom now as an actress that I haven’t had in my career. I’m 55. I can do what I want. So, if I feel like doing a tiny little part in a little indie movie with a first-time guy that’s shot on his iPhone in his apartment, I can do that.”
“I’m not interested in being perfect when I’m older. I’m interested in having a narrative. It’s the narrative that’s really the most beautiful thing about women.”
“Love and respect are the most important aspects of parenting, and of all relationships.”
“I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.”
“There is nothing in this world that I am prouder of than my ability to feel, to survive and, yes, to be a fool for what I love and believe in.”
“It’s very hard for me to get a new car. It’s really hard for me to get a new house. It’s really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability.”
“I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family and my friends.”
“You hold all of our futures in your hands. So you better make it good.”
Next, Julia Roberts quotes.
