Julian Barnes Quotes

I'm not going to try and change how people perceive me. I think it's important to be a contradiction. People are contradictions; everyone has contradictions. So I don't expect anyone to look at me differently.

I'm quite looking forward to the fact that people know me as Richard rather than Craig.

The average person's ear weighs what you are, not what you were.

All I want is for people not to see me as this cartoon monster.

I'm not dead and I don't have blue hair but some people say there are similarities. It is usually intolerable to watch myself onscreen but this time it's fine. I think it's beautiful and a real work of art.

I feel like when people judge me they're not judging me, because they don't know who I am.

People see me as Andre first. Then they see me as someone who happens to be a Muslim.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

I don't know that any of us can control our own image. We are what other people see.

Maybe some people look at me and just see a footballer, or a black footballer. But I am much more than this. I tell my best friends all the time, 'If you look at me as a footballer, and not as Little Kouli, and not as your friend, then I have failed in life.'

'Nimona' is about identity and if who you are is defined by what you look like. It's not a book about body image at all, but I would be lying if I said that wasn't in there even at the conception of it.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

To me the ambiguity is, maybe our perception of ourselves is always going to be different than somebody else's perception. There will always be that disparity.

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

All my life, everybody has seen me a certain way. What do you see?

...and yet I am what they think I am.

I wonder how I seem to them. They must see someone I don't see. Someone capable and strong. Someone I can't be; someone I can be.

As women, we're always in negotiation with how we're being perceived versus how we feel.

Each person tells you who they think they are, and who they think you are.

People often expect me to be something other than what I am.

I didn't want to have to deal with having any moniker or separation between the self that I see and know myself as.

When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don't take a good picture,' what they mean is they haven't come to terms with how they look. They take a fine picture, it's just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.

My public persona is badly warped and bears little resemblance to the person those closest to me know.

There's a discrepancy between what you think you are and what other people think you are.