Translated by oritsu_luv
2009

 

Namie Amuro’s Sayings

– I don’t care about marriage anymore! I’m the type of person who can’t balance the two.

– After you debut, it’s important to think abut what you’re going to do and how you can become an entertainer that really touches people’s hearts.

– Loving, getting angry, and feeling lonely…I’m always serious about those things. That’s what an Okinawan does.

– In the beginning the staff was always getting angry at me. ‘Your eyebrows are too thin, your hair is too light, etc’.

– I don’t have an assured place here anymore, but that means that I can go wherever I want.

– My work is a reflection of what I’m most interested in now, but at the moment I’m not going to make songs myself. I feel like it would just end in ego, and besides, I don’t want people to think, ‘So this is what she’s thinking about now’.

– I can’t concern myself with things that I can’t imagine.

– Sometimes I do get into fights with the staff. But I always back up my own opinion.

– When it comes to things like staging and costumes, I regret it if it’s not something I really think is good. Believing in your own artistic sensibilities can be scary, but once you take first step, you open the door to a whole new dimension.

– By taking responsibility for everything I do, I can be the one to choose my own path. I don’t try to control things.

– Sometimes I decide things based on my gut feeling, and I don’t have a unifying theme. But I do have confidence that ‘This is it!’.

– Since I’m living my life now I want to ride on the waves of this era. It makes things exciting and lets me discover new things.

– There are a lot of times I think, “I should have done that.” But [not doing them] has also made me who I am today.

– The last scene we filmed the video for ‘Baby Don’t Cry’ was the one at the Odaiba where I was surrounded by couples and it kind of pissed me off. I remember thinking ‘Dammit!’

– In my songs I sing about strong women, but in real life I’m both strong and weak. I want to be the kind of woman who can say how she really feelings about things.

– When people were telling me about the ‘Amuro Boom’ I stopped knowing what I was supposed to do. Often the pressure was so great that I couldn’t sleep at night.

– I’m a horrible actor. But I think I’m pretty good at acting like a little demon.

– Lately I’ve been thinking that I want to play the artist Namie Amuro. In the past, I didn’t think about that at all, but there was a period when I couldn’t keep things balanced anymore, and I had a really hard time because I couldn’t switch back and forth between my private life and my work…

– The manga I’d recommend now is BASARA by Yumi Tamura. It makes me cry every time!

– During my concert, when I have a dance move that turns me backwards I always gulp a dew deep breathes.

– Hmm…I just eat. I eat a lot of meat. I love Korean BBQ, like kalbi or hormone!

– Now that I’m in my thirties, I have a much clearer vision of how I want to change or move forward. In the past, I often rushed, thinking “I want to change quickly! Faster!” But now I take it slow…

– I want to be a really tough singer. And I want to be fearless.

– When I made my debut, I just thought, “Maybe I’ll quit singing in like 5 years.” I didn’t understand the idea of continuing for a long time.

– When I got married and had took a break from work to have my son, I wasn’t scared of anything. But after things happened with my mother, it was always so painful. I wonder why so much has happened in my life? I wanted to quit my job, and quit being Namie Amuro.

– I’m a slow starter and it takes me a while to realize something, so I thought that I could never find my own style through anything but making music. But lately I’ve come to understand my own way of doing things. Maybe that’s why lately, singing is so much fun for me.

– The one thing that never changes is the fact that I want to ‘sing and dance’.