Tony Curtis Quotes

I know, for a fact, that I'm a very different person on my own than I am with someone else. We are different with each other. These things are constantly adjusted. And that's true of humans. That's not just true of famous people.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

When I was, like, 10, I decided it would look really cool, so I pretended I was British. And I've been doing that ever since.

We're all playing a role. You're playing a role at home, you're playing a role at work, you're playing a role to survive.

Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us.

Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me.

We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.--PERFORMANCE

Everybody is an actor in one way or another. We are all performing certain things.

Every character, no matter who you play, at times is pretending to be somebody else. People have a public face and a private face.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

Adolescents show off. That's another way of wanting to connect with people. It's not an aspect of human behavior that we generally consider to be very admirable, but it is, in some way, a means of connecting with someone else and not being alone.

I am an observant. I like to observe people.

There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.

We all have split personalities; we all wear masks at some point in our careers.

I think, in a lot of ways, we underestimate how much clothing plays a part in achieving our identities and in how we want the world to deal with us.

We all have to wear social masks in our daily lives to get by.

When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his 'social identity' - to use a term that is better than 'social status' because personal attributes such as 'honesty' are involved, as well as structural ones, like 'occupation.'

Because I am fascinated by people and what makes them behave the way they do. I think it is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

You sort of perform your personality, I guess, to everyone on some level.

Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.

In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. George will have to be George; the George they have named and will recognise. So now he consciously applies himself to thinking their thoughts, getting into their mood. With the skill of a veteran, he rapidly puts on the psychological makeup for this role he must play.

You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.

To impress people as much as we would wish, we would first need to successfully adopt each of their value systems

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.