103+ Tilda Swinton Quotes On Friendship, Queue And Eccentric

Tilda Swinton is an English actress, model, and artist. She is known for her roles in films such as The Chronicles of Narnia, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Swinton has received numerous awards and nominations, including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tilda Swinton on love, life, friendship.

Top 10 Tilda Swinton Quotes

1. 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.
2. It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.
3. This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent on surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing.
4. I'm from the same planet as David Bowie.
5. I think there's a dishonorable tradition in Hollywood to give the idea, particularly to children, that evil characters are dark.
6. 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.
7. Faith is in the eye of the beholder.
8. We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Tilda Swinton Short Quotes

• I always think of the word 'abandonment' when I think of the character.
• It was an amazing performer. Very temperamental, it spent a lot of time in its trailer.
• In my house, a hot dog is a dog that's really hot.
• There's nothing I'm particularly keen to hide about my humanity.
• We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on.
• When I'm in northern Italy, I walk about feeling slightly less of a freak.
• I have no problems with the NC-17 rating. I want more NC-17 films. More adult cinema!
• I'm interested in that whole question of where we wear our identity and how can we see it.
• If I'd been asked to play an Asian man [in Doctor Strange] I would've shown them Benedict Wong.
• It was just me, naked as underneath my clothes right now, as all of you are.

Tilda Swinton Quotes About Love

A large part of my filmmaking self has to do with my love of being in the cinema audience, and my relationships to what I want to see on the screen, what I have seen on the screen and what I don't want to see on the screen again. — Tilda Swinton

One of the wonderful things that I've always loved as an art student, what I always loved about comics, was that they are interpreted differently by different graphic artists all the time, so now film is doing that thanks to Marvel Studios. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton Quotes About Life

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

To be honest the work that a producer does is work that I've done for most of my working life. It's work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando. We developed it together over five years. — Tilda Swinton

About actors' lives... I'm not the person to ask. I don't live an actor's life and I really don't know. I probably read less about actors' lives than you all do. So, I'm in the dark about all of that, sorry. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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

Tilda Swinton Quotes About Kindness

This is the launch of the Doctor Strange film interpretation, of - in my view - a classic, which has been interpreted many times by other graphic artists and this is just our graphic interpretation of The Ancient One. I would say the whole approach is about a kind of fluidity. — Tilda Swinton

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? — Tilda Swinton

The story, it's really important to The Ancient One that Doctor Strange does cut it because The Ancient One needs a successor, or certainly needs - you could say - a son. So The Ancient One is really invested in Doctor Strange, it's a very kind of primal relationship. — Tilda Swinton

I remember when I first started to be photographed, people couldn't understand how it was possible to go around with no eyelashes, no eyebrows. Now it's much more accepted for people not to wear eyelashes or lipstick or whatever they do, but then it was quite freaky. Um, a kind of boiled look. — Tilda Swinton

I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience. — Tilda Swinton

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

When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together. — Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton Quotes About People

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage. — Tilda Swinton

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

I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, one of those lazy people who spends a lot of time with Italian friends and yet constantly says I don't speak Italian. Things slow down when I start speaking Italian. — Tilda Swinton

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

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. — Tilda Swinton

Anybody knows who lives with animals, they teach you more about what it is to be a good human than most people: patience, goodheartedness, enthusiasm, presence, forgiveness, focus, restfulness, honesty. — Tilda Swinton

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

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true. — Tilda Swinton

For me, sex is a refraction of the thing about identity. In the sexual contact, which is usually - but not exclusively - between two people, you do retain separate people. — Tilda Swinton

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

Tilda Swinton Famous Quotes And Sayings

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment. — Tilda Swinton

Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother. — Tilda Swinton

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

I'm very much drawn to these stories. This is a huge, great story [in Doctor Strange] about the possibility of living beyond everything, living beyond mortality, living beyond all the immortal confines, living beyond the planet as we know it. It's mind-blowingly no limits, and I think this is going to be something else. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste. — Tilda Swinton

The work is different in the sense that I haven't had to travel round the world raising money, or work from the genesis of the project. But the collaboration feels clear always, it's sort of my drug, I'm in it for the conversation. The conversation's the most important part of it. — Tilda Swinton

George [Clooney] and I do have the aim one day to be in a film where we say one nice thing to each other. Hopefully one day. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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

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

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

I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind. — Tilda Swinton

I knew Spike Jonze would do something really interesting with it. — Tilda Swinton

What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

Well the truth is, everybody, when they die, leaves a void that cannot be filled. — Tilda Swinton

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

I follow my nose. It’s as simple as that. — Tilda Swinton

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

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

We also knew [ me and Ewan McGregor] that, on a practical level, if there was going to be that much sex in the film [Young Adam] - which there clearly had to be because sex is the meat and potatoes of the thing - it had to be varied for the audience, because it's important to keep the audience living in it. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

The last time I did anything like this [special powers] was with the Narnia film with two swords, the same but different. — Tilda Swinton

It's wonderful to actually have an opportunity to get real and show how complicated and fascinating sex is. — Tilda Swinton

Do you want a list of what my dogs taught me? Patience, perspective, joy, loyalty, the simplicity and presence of their joy. That's a really great daily reminder, bad stuff happens, difficult stuff happens and you take them out onto the beach and you go "OK, now I see". You tell them the current political situation in the world and they go "should we go for a walk?" And you go, right, that's the correct answer. — Tilda Swinton

I'll tell you one thing, and this is banal to say because it just makes it sound like it's all planned, and nothing is planned at all. But one link is with The Deep End, and one link is that I'm making a film later on that revolves around the relationship between an innocent party and a dead body. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

One of the things about Derek Jarman was that he was a painter who worked alone when he painted, but I firmly believe that one of the reasons he made films was for the company. He made filmmakers of all of us, that's the truth. I don't mean he necessarily made directors, but he made us filmmakers. Because we lived in a state of mutual responsibility for what we made. — Tilda Swinton

The only real struggle [in Doctor Strange] was casting spells - learning all these amazing things with fingers, and then remembering what to say at the same time. They would say, 'So you have to put your hands there, not there because the light is going to go [MAKES SOUND] so that kind of masks... but it was all good. — Tilda Swinton

The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible. — Tilda Swinton

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation. — Tilda Swinton

I would say, and this sounds like a rather immodest thing to say, but the truth is it's probably the most amazing thing of all, it's pretty much exactly what I thought we were going to make, what I hoped we'd make. — Tilda Swinton

I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

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

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. — Tilda Swinton

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. — Tilda Swinton

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child. — Tilda Swinton

[My work] just develops and develops, and I'm very nicely served by the universe: just as I'm ready to take the conversation further with myself, some other individual pops up, like David McKenzie did, with this idea of making this film [Teknolust], and provides exactly the leap to the next adventure. — Tilda Swinton

I wasn't around when Nic was playing Donald. I was around with Charlie. — Tilda Swinton

In The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?". — Tilda Swinton

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity. — Tilda Swinton

The Ancient One, as you know, is the master, is the Sorcerer Supreme, and [Doctor] Strange comes to learn how to heal himself and The Ancient One has got the knowledge. And so what you're seeing today is a part of the whole training section when he's learning the moves and digging deep. So it's all about that, it's all about trying to push him to get there. — Tilda Swinton

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place. — Tilda Swinton

What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film. — Tilda Swinton

Well you know, the comic strip [Doctor Strange]... yeah, was an Asian man, in fact, a very ancient Tibetan man living on the top of a mountain. The film script that I was given wasn't an Asian man, so I wasn't asked to play an Asian man - I was asked to play an ancient Celtic person. — Tilda Swinton

It may be unfair of me but I do feel I know it. — Tilda Swinton

This film [Teknolust] in particular, showing the way in which having a sexual dialogue with someone can be something developing and changeable and maybe uncomfortable and complicated. Just complicated and human, no more and no less. — Tilda Swinton

There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that. — Tilda Swinton

I'm a huge Marvel fan and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics and it says, "Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it, it's elastic. It's bouncy." — Tilda Swinton

Nic's Charlie is something very particular. You can't really put them together. It's a phantasm. — Tilda Swinton

Life Lessons by Tilda Swinton

1. Tilda Swinton is an inspiring example of someone who has taken risks and pushed boundaries in her career, showing us that it is possible to pursue creative and unconventional paths.
2. She has also demonstrated her commitment to creating meaningful art and using her platform to speak out on important issues, reminding us of the power of using our voices to make a difference.
3. Finally, her work reminds us to be open-minded and to embrace diversity and inclusivity in all aspects of life.