Nathan Englander Quotes

A good undercover agent stays as close to the truth as possible, as close to your own personality and your own values as possible. This is the way you stay in character - you try to be yourself.

I knew with Snape I was working as a double agent, as it turns out, and a very good one at that.

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

I think it was the sense that Turn is a spy thriller, and that's a genre that really fascinates me, in general.

We are what we seem to be.

Janie: So you're a double agent? Cabel: Sure.That sounds sexy.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

Esse quam videri," Celia says. "To be, rather than to seem.

First think of the person who lives in disguise, Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies. Next, tell me what's always the last thing to mend, The middle of middle and the end of end? And finally give me the sound often heard During the search for a hard-to-find word. Now string them together, and answer me this, Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?

The more I protest that I'm not Lemony Snicket, and that I'm Daniel Handler instead, the more it becomes clear to the audience that I am in fact Lemony Snicket, that I am in fact standing in front of them.

We all become what we pretend to be.

Listen to me: a family man is never a real family man. An assassin is never entirely assassin. They play a role, you understand. While a dead man, he is really dead. To be or not to be, right?

Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

Seeming and being are not one and the same.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

Like someone once said, "If you're going to play the part, you better wear the eye patch." You need to perform the function, you know.

To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.

But there's so much that was a lie, it's hard to figure out what was true, what was real, what matters.

I am not what you see and hear.

I'd be that James Bond character from the Beautyrest commercial that we did. Maybe some day.

What one beholds of a woman is the least part of her.

The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.

You can't just replace someone with a regular-looking guy who didn't say any of the lines.

Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with