Yancy Butler Quotes

I got through with my ability to mimic others and make people laugh. I swaggered through life, but, in reality, I lived in fear pretty much every day. I acted like a completely normal person, and I suppose I was good at it. But, inside, it was a very different story.

Just being a normal person and having a social life involves a lot of dishonesty for me.

Tell a man that he is putting on a stage performance in order to get what he wants, and he will irritably reject your observation. Why? Because most people go through life as cunning actors with a permanent horror of getting found out.

I've been pretending to be normal for so much of my life.

There's this unspoken club where you say to each other: Oh God, if they only knew how ordinary I was, they wouldn't be interested. That includes movie stars and politicians.

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

I didn't apply to any colleges - I lied to all my friends and told them I was going to UCSD, because all their parents would be like, 'Mark, where're you going to college?' and I'd just lie 'cause I felt it was unrealistic to be an actor.

People know when you're frontin'.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

We are so used to dissembling with others that in time we come to deceive and dissemble with ourselves.

I'm not confident at all. You just pretend you are.

I don't know, I don't know how to do anything. I'm just like, doing impressions of what I've seen other people do, and hoping no one knows that I'm actually just a little monster in a human suit making my arms go up and down.

When you're pretending to be something you're not, at least for me, you end up falling on your face.

Not comfortable doing song and dance stuff as no normal person does in his/her real life.

It's boring to be a poser.

I always feel like I'm an actress.

I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

Men take more pains to mask than mend.

If you're trying to be something you're not, you can see right through it.

I'm forever making it out like I have got it all together and I know what I'm doing. The truth is I haven't got a clue what I'm doing.

Any situation where I feel like people are looking at me and I've got to speak is the kind of thing I have nightmares about.

I had to fool the world into accepting me. I didn't seem to fit the mould of my idols.

One thing Jim McGreevey wants the world to know: Leading a double life as a gay man trying to appear straight was easy for him to pull off. He was 'good' at it. Not only that - it helped him become a better politician.

It's dangerous that we can all paint a completely false picture of ourselves.

At first, I was scared that if I claimed I modeled, people would be like, 'What?'