Amor Towles Quotes

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

I don't leave the house without thinking of how to represent myself.

I'm trying to have some control over my image.

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.

The ego knows itself by comparison.

Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.

But even when I do give interviews, I always come across as such a completely different person. It seems like there's no controlling it anyway.

We're actors in our lives, pretendin' to be who we want people to think we are.

It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

People seem to be interested in me. So I try to keep my acting pretty simple.

People define themselves aesthetically at a very young age.

People who don't know me, how will they know what I am really like? They will only see me on the field, only see me in an advertisement. People who know what kind of a guy I am will tell you I'm a very open person.

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.

I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it. Maybe things would have gone differently for me in some ways if I had.

I think that you have to present an image that is... true to you, and... the way you would like to be perceived, so I think that through the years I've worked really hard at trying to create an image that is true to me.

The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.

By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.'

We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual.

Much of social media can be seen as the 'News of me.' It's not so much a platform for connecting and sharing as it is a platform for advertising the idea of yourself you want to portray to others: the image of yourself you want to project.

I've always just introduced myself as Adam Copeland. I never really thought too much about it.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.