Geisha Quotes

The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women...Every girl in the world should have geisha training. (Diana Vreeland)

There's nothing in Chinese culture that is an equivalent of the geisha. It's so different, so special to Japan.

Zhang Ziyi

For myself I don't like the geisha look. It's like a mask.

Zhang Ziyi

I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for Memoirs of a Geisha wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values.

Roger Ebert

A white woman tipsy at the club, discoursing sexual needs unsatisfied by an overworked and debilitated husband, was a great topic of scandal in the bazaar. It was a man's world, and a realistic planter or government officer should have been content with beery sodality and the odd session with a geisha or perempuan jahat. But these men had been to decent schools and were romantic. It was the same in Burma, as Orwell reminds us. The French suffered less.

Anthony Burgess

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

Arthur Golden

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

Arthur Golden

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

Arthur Golden

'Memoirs of a Geisha' is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

Stephen Hunter

I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion... it was much more graceful and contained than that.

Michelle Yeoh

From my opinion, 'geisha' means a woman skilled in the arts, like dancing, singing and playing musical instruments. (Zhang Ziyi)

I am secretly a costume drama queen. Oo, I love me some Merchant Ivory films! I do! If there is a petticoat and Helena Bonham Carter, already I can feel the tears well up in my eyes. I love me some period films! And I know that I will never be in them. I will never be in any of these movies, unless I am laying down on my side smoking some opium. And I get offered movie roles all the time, but I say, "No! No! I don't want to play a manicurist. I don't want to play a really pissed-off liquor store owner. I don't want to go nowhere with a chicken under my arm. I don't want to play an exceptionally good student, I do not want to get off a tour bus and take numerous photographs, I do not ever want to utter the phrase, 'Welcome to Japan, Mr. Bond'! I don't want to write down all my memoirs about being a geisha!" What it is, is that I cannot run up a wall!!

Margaret Cho

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

Arthur Golden