Tavi Gevinson Quotes

Graduating high school was really emotional for me. I'd obviously made a huge thing out of what that experience was for me, and saying goodbye to it was very weird. So I had to be like, boom, onward and upward.

When you're a kid you're already trying to create your own world and organize the one in front of you, but then you get all insecure around 6th grade and don't think you have a right to share that. I think it was my mom's attitude about art and being part of the narcissistic digital generation or whatever that made me think anyone would care what I had to say about anything!

I did community theater and kids programs at professional theaters and plays at school and voice lessons for seven years. I stopped because it was so time-consuming. But then I realized that I had access to this world where I could go on auditions. And there wasn't too much of an identity crisis when I started acting professionally because I had been acting longer than I had been writing. It didn't feel new.

To me, being a woman in 2016 is allowing myself to contain multitudes. Looking at who's given the space to do so and why.

Meaning lies in the magic of the coincidence that you should come across work at just the right time.

Oh God, I'm awful at sports. In gym I just try and avoid getting hit in the face.

I have a problem with people saying feminine means anti-feminist, and I think it's counter-productive to immediately associate anything "girly" with vanity or stupidity. I also think it takes away from girls' agency to say that girls who are interested in that kind of thing only are because they don't know what's good for them.

Women are complicated...not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people.

I love art, but I don't think I'm especially good at it. Fashion I think I could imagine, but I'm not really sure. I think it's easiest for me to picture myself in music.

Some of my clothes are things that we'd play dress up with when we were little, and it's funny that now I'm wearing it like as an everyday thing. But if I say 'vintage' or 'thrifted' on the blog, there's this community of fashion bloggers and I've become sort of tight with some of them, and we like just send each other packages. If I'm thrifting and I find this great dress but it won't fit me and I won't grow into it because I'm impossibly tiny, I don't want to let it sit there. I'll buy it and send it to a friend.

I always joke that I'd like to be a cat 'cause then I'll have nine lives, and then I can do like everything. But that's really hard.

We all have the people we follow on Tumblr whose opinions or taste we respect. And I think because you see so much more variety of opinions and everything on the internet, it's less decided that something is good or bad. It's more like we all just sort of like what we like.

I try not to do anything I don't like, so I stay motivated pretty easily.

My life motto is basically to lower your standards and expectations so you're never disappointed and never put any trust in anything, and I try to prepare for the day that I wake up and everyone I know is like LOL JK BEST LONG - RUNNING PRACTICAL JOKE EVER, so I've never really let myself freak out or get too excited about anything. Not in an effort to be cool or not care or anything, just out of neurosis.

I think one of the hardest things to do in film or TV is to make something feel real, which is weird because it's about being a person, and life is something that everyone making films and TV can relate to.

Fashion intersects a lot with art and film and music, and that was appealing to me. I read a bunch of fashion blogs and wanted to be part of the community.

I think it's really hard to find a good women's magazine, and I like that Glamour is way more about what you want and not what your man wants. I don't really know what it's like to be a woman yet, so I wouldn't have too much insight, but I guess it would be a bit interesting to have more of that granny style in there. Because I think it should be easier for women to feel like they don't have to be conventionally attractive or think of flattering clothing before they think of fun clothing.

What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable.

I have a lot of love for the resilience personified in so many achievements made by Americans. I feel not American when that idea of resilience is appropriated to justify discrimination, e.g., "Make America Great Again."

When I wrote my blog and went to fashion week, I got a lot of shade from older editors about paying my dues and educating myself. I get where they were coming from, but it's also weird now to see their institutions scramble to use the internet in a way that's not savvy, but genuinely effective and exciting to people. I've been doing that for years.

I'm not exactly in a position where I get to be super-picky about the roles I get. But I would also never want to be a part of something that I think is poor in taste or doesn't align with what I believe in.

There are things that feel so small but are such a big part of life.

Feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process...

There are moments when I am really not happy with how I look, or I think it would be an easy way out to try and do the conventionally attractive thing. But part of it is that I don't have the energy to put on, like, makeup. If people want to do that, that's fine. But I've learned that it's not for me.

I don't really read that much stuff about myself anyways, because I feel as though you then develop this mind-set of just making sure other people would approve of your decisions.

I think that everybody wants to be heard, and the easiest way to be the loudest is to be the hater.

You don’t have to be special, you just have to be kind.

I've never really felt like a journalist. I've felt like a writer and a diarist. I have made myself vulnerable in my writing, and I think that vulnerability makes people strong. My favorite performances or works of art are always people showing that side of themselves.

Then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple, when, in actuality, women are complicated, women are multifaceted - not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people.

I do find working with people in the entertainment industry hard. It can cause anxiety and depression.

I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.

The Internet, really. It's amazing what you can find. There are so many different resources on the Internet and I got into blogging because of my friend's sister who had a blog, Fashion Robot, which she stopped a few months ago just because it was too much time ... I started taking more of an interest in fashion, and going to more websites like Style.com or whatever. Eventually I made a hasty decision and made my own.

I think it'd be great to own a fun concept store with my friends and just sell books and records.

The best cure for procrastination is to have so much on your plate that procrastination is no longer an option.

I think it was my mom's attitude about art and being part of the narcissistic digital generation or whatever that made me think anyone would care what I had to say about anything!

If you are intimidated by the artists who came before you, understand you too have a place, right next to them.

I'm not obsessively a follower of fashion in the way I used to be. But I still have all those magazines I bought at the time because I bought ones that felt a little timeless, more like books.

I don't think I was ever thinking critically about my aesthetic, I think it's enough when you're little just to understand that you can give yourself the permission to try and see things differently or create something original, even though you probably won't make anything original for a really long time.

I try to make everything creative because it's stimulating. There is this great Stanley Kubrick quote somewhere about how life is sort of bad and how creating is important because it lets a little light in.

I will try to hold on to the intense feeling. I will both be glad that that’s no longer happening and kind of miss it. When you’re 14, you’re basically on drugs all the time - the hormones in your body are so crazy. But I really loved and appreciated the intensity of that. And you’re experiencing everything for the first time, so everything feels like an epiphany. And, like, I really liked the experience of having a crush, because I was like, this is my thing and it doesn’t have to do with you and you’re just some dummy boy for me to project on.

My only job has been to say that you have to, try different things and let yourself become a different person, have experiences.

I wanted to start a website for teenaged girls that was not kind of this one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing, because one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be feminists, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in their beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all the answers...and this is not true and actually, recognizing all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I realized that feminism was not a rule book but a discussion, a conversation, a process.

Some of what makes growing up hard for famous kids is that they don't have room to do immature stuff. I was really happy that I could go to school and hang out behind the alley and be somewhat irresponsible.

I see so few scripts just because, for whatever reason, there just aren't that many good scripts with a young, teenaged girl. So it's always been sporadic. People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.

I try to be very honest in my writing. It's amazing, though, to think that people are responding to what we do, but it's okay if they're responding in a positive way too, because I think just creating anything at all to put out there is a gift.

One thing that I always liked about fashion was that it was tied in with music and art and film.

It brings me no joy and not enough comfort to dwell too much on things I've said or written or made or worn in the past.

"Girly" can be limiting if you're told it's the only option. I don't think the solution is to get rid of the girly stuff or decide it's oppressive and get mad at a singer or book for not ACCURATELY REPRESENTING ALL WOMEN. There just needs to be more options for girls who don't identify with the girly aesthetic, and can broaden the idea of what being a girl means. Similarly, there needs to be more of that stuff that can be aesthetically girly, but feminist in the actual message.