Ben Lerner Quotes

I feel like a fraud... My name is not even actually Ashton. Ashton is my middle name.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

John McCain... looks like a fraud to me.

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.

So far I’m not seeing a lot of difference between me and a carnival con-man.

Seriously, I've just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.

In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.

I've been living a lie all my life.

Cheating on a quiz show? That's sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip.

Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.

I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.

Hypocrisy is a detriment to progress. There's always a hidden agenda.

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

I was living a life of a lie, I really was.

Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

'My Struggle' came from a place of questioning and feelings of inauthenticity and frustration, and almost all of that is gone.

People have referred to me as 'innocent', which makes me feel disingenuous.

Try to strip me of my credibility and make me look fake, G you only gonna be in for a rude awakening.

I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.

I grew up with the idealistic notion that writing and literature were noble causes. I had no inkling, no sense of what I would eventually encounter in terms of people who weren't being sincere. I'm not saying that it happens always or a lot, but it happens enough that sometimes it makes me feel a little queasy.

Come on now! How could you be me and want to be someone else?

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

Woe to falsehood! it affords no relief to the breast, like truth; it gives us no comfort, pains him who forges it, and like an arrow directed by a god flies back and wounds the archer.

Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live.