Michel Foucault Quotes

I benefit from the Mr. Potato Head syndrome. Put a wig and a nose and glasses on me, and I disappear.

It's not a real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants.

I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

I love Sia and how she hides her face. If I could pull off doing that, I totally would.

The beauty of the character is that it's like camouflage. It's the best costume ever. I rarely get recognized as Pornstache when I'm out in public. Most people recognize me as the Law & Order guy, when I'm out in public.

When making a record, I could done a new face pretty easily and use all these different devices to hide who I am - or who I was - which really had very little to do with what I was trying to convey.

It's much easier to put yourself out there under the guise of a character. You get a different name, different habits, different words. When I have to just be Nathan, that's when I feel vulnerable.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

I write in order to belong.

People don't recognize me from gig to gig. They have no idea. But, that's really what I strive to do. I strive to stip myself down completely and build another human and become them.

Efficiency obliterates identity

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.

I'm realizing, you don't need to change anything about yourself. This is who you are, and it's okay. That's daring.

Our persona was not created by accident; it was created in order to camouflage the parts of ourselves we deemed the most undesirable and to overcompensate for what we believe to be our deepest flaws. What persona are you hiding behind?

I prefer to remain anomalous.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.

She is no longer I, she is too long ago, she is only she.

I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing.

Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody.

If I book a hotel it's actually very funny. It's very nice to be a genuine Mr Smith.