David Milch Quotes

I could easily not be the person that people know.

We struggle throughout our lives to learn to accept the shell that transports us through this world, and many of us take great effort to change it. I believe everyone has at least once looked in the mirror and thought, 'That is not me. I am someone else. The world cannot see me as I really am.'

The fundamental thing about my personality is that I think I'm an imposter.

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

If I feel like I'm myself, then I'm very uncomfortable.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

I'm never quite sure if I'm me when I'm dressed up.

A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation

How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?

I lost my reputation, I forgot my truth. But I have my beauty and I have my youth.

Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

It's not important what other people call you. If you yourself know you're a fake, that's tougher to live with.

I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few became qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to one - to who I am. And that's who I am.

We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had such a reputation, and it was sad because I felt like it so didn't represent who I really was.

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.

That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.

It demeans you to cover rotten meat with honey. I know what I am. What would you want with a monster?" "Everything.

When I look at myself, I don't see the man I wanted to be.

The conflict between what one is and who one is expected to be touches all of us. And sometimes, rather than reach for what one could be, we choose the comfort of the failed role, preferring to be the victim of circumstance, the person who didn't have a chance.

We'll see who believes in me now. I am the Prankster God - I am killing me!