Gene Wolfe Quotes

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.

We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.

The world isn't what I've believed it to be, and I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.

I crawled in the bathroom, looked in the mirror and saw the devil. It was me.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved.

At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.

It's not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.

Did you ever wonder if the person in the picture is the same one you see when you look in the mirror?" - "That's the eternal question, isn't it? Are we born who we are, or do we make ourselves that way?

I went to school, and I remember that you had to do these tests to find out what set you're in - how clever you are. I put down "Kit Harington," and they looked at me like I was completely stupid, and they said, "No, you're Christopher Harington, I'm afraid." It was only then I learnt my actual name. That was kind of a bizarre existential crisis for an 11-year-old to have, but in the end I always stuck with Kit, because I felt that's who I was. I'm not really a "Chris."

Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I. Don Juan Matus

You know, then that the public Somebody you are when you 'have a name' is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath

Your inability to see yourself clearly is what's keeping you alive.

I've played myself before this ["Brent Spiner"] - and I've played myself since, for that matter - and playing yourself one of the most difficult characters you can play, 'cause God knows most of us don't know who that is.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, something's not accurate?

If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?

I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.

I know who I am. Bloody hell, I'm getting enough bills for Karl Pilkington so I hope I am him, 'cos if I'm not, I have no idea who I'm paying for

As a consumer of entertainment, as a director, I'm always interested in questions of identity and who someone is and how they're perceived and who they are versus who they thought they'd be.

I don't know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don't identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

I know who I am. I don't see myself as this whoever they see me as.