Tilda Swinton Quotes

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me.

Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

I would rather be handsome for an hour than pretty for a week.

This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing.

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

I'm from the same planet as David Bowie.

I'm interested in that whole question of where we wear our identity and how can we see it.

I think there's a dishonorable tradition in Hollywood to give the idea, particularly to children, that evil characters are dark.

Sexuality is, of course, a great way of having a conversation between people.

I live a soldier's life when I'm working. That's how it feels to me, except I've got a slightly greater chance of survival.

I think that a real film fan experience is about a kind of omnivorous experience.

I have this very strange relationship with my work, which is that it's like a conversation between me and it.

I've been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I've been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity.

We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.

Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.

I was just talking to Benedict [Cumberbatch] who's got a little baby and knows his father lives in his phone. We as humans are evolving really fast, so everyday we're hit with that.

Archetypes are always [in my film-making]. It's sometimes interesting to just flip them a little bit and see the underside.

The problem for me is that I look like so many people in my family, so I can't really see anything. Except I could say that I look rather like my father without his mustache.

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.

I have no problems with the NC-17 rating. I want more NC-17 films. More adult cinema!

I always think of the word 'abandonment' when I think of the character.

We must hang on to the idea that we can actually change things. That's the sort of environment that Joe finds himself in, in Young Adam.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

What very often happens when people make films about rich people, the camera is quite mesmerised by the opulence and quite theatrical in fact.

It was an amazing performer. Very temperamental, it spent a lot of time in its trailer.

I would say that I think the film [I am love] is absolutely about nature, it recommends human nature. You don't need to recommend change, that's inevitable, it's the only reliable thing we have.

Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.

We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on.

There's an alarm bell that goes off in my head if I can sense that I'm making a mistake.

You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes.

We were very clear that this film's [Young Adam] so much about a relationship that's borne out through the sexual contact, and that that's the way they communicate.

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

When I'm in northern Italy, I walk about feeling slightly less of a freak.

There's no need there to sit with the filmmaker for 11 years to develop the script, or go round the world raising money.

In my house, a hot dog is a dog that's really hot.

I made The War Zone when I had just given birth to twins, and my post-partum frame was very much on display there.

I've only ever gone into studio films with people I really like.

We're filling a big universe [in Doctor Strange], and so the look and the sort of plasticity of us is really important to us when we're striking poses here. It's very important, it's really great.

Alexander Trocchi was an existentialist. He was looking at an alienated artist in the post-war period. It's modern because it applies now as well.

We [ with Ewan McGregor] decided exactly what we would do at every moment, what the texture would be.

I was not, and am not, officially a producer of that film [I am love] but the work of what a producer does I learned at that stage and to a certain extent I've been a producer ever since.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?

I'm just really old [in Doctor Strange]. Just really, really old. There is I suppose a sort of theme tune which I'm really interested in.

The whole thing of working in collaboration with filmmakers is the thing that I love the most, and possibly the thing I do the best.

Eleven years is a great length of time to prepare a movie, it would be wonderful to have 11 years of funded preparation.

The people I'm working with tend to be people I know, who are my friends, and I like hanging out with them. There's nothing better than making a long-term project with your friends. It's just dreamy.

I remember noticing, when I had my babies, how much I liked them, and not just loved them, but I was really into them. I knew I was going to be curious about them, and up for the mayhem ahead.