Austin Aries Quotes

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

There's a constant anxiety that comes from having an innate sense of self, yet existing within a homogenised, aspirational culture.

I was very pushed to look a certain way and act a certain way, and it wasn't me, but I played by their rules to get my foot in the door.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.

Somebody once told me I shouldn't try to change Hollywood. That isn't my point at all. I don't want Hollywood to change me.

I never quite became the monster I wanted to be. I feel mostly monstrous as I more become myself. Because the more you become yourself, the more it disturbs other people.

I know, if I would have won 'X-Factor' and if I would have continued in that lane, I would have spiraled out of control. Performing on there was good, but it wasn't me. It was me compromising for the judges, just different people around.

I was in New York and was pursuing musical theater, and it didn't feel right. I felt I was forcing myself to do things and be things that I wasn't, all the time. I wasn't listening to what I wanted to do. I was listening to what I thought I should do.

I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.

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

It wasn't that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious. It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn't.

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

The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free.

I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

If I start giving people what they like I'll turn into one of them and I don't want to be one of them I want to be one of me.

We think we need to create ourselves, always doing a paste-up job on our personalities. That is because we're trying to be special rather than real. We're pathetically trying to conform with all the other people trying to do the same.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

I needed to stop being what everyone thought I was.

Master, I'm afraid. I am, truly. This place scares me. At home, I know who I am, what to do. I'm the Warden's daughter, I know where I stand. But this is a dangerous place, full of pitfalls. All my life, I've known it was waiting for me, but now I'm not sure I can face it. They'll want to absorb me, make me one of them, and I won't change. I won't! I want to stay me." Jared sighed and she saw his dark gaze was fixed on the veiled window. "Claudia, you're the bravest person I know. And no one will change you. You will rule here, though it won't be easy.

I'm losing myself trying to compete with everyone else, instead of just being me.

I didn't have any definition of self. I never fit in, so I started pretending I was other people. I'd find people I thought were cool and dress how they dressed, talk how they talked, do whatever they were into. This led to a period of drugs and anchohol. When his family gave him an ultimatum to get clean or they'd report him to the police Corey said, "I was done fighting myself. I finally said, "I'm gonna start looking at my life and figure out why I'm doing this.

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.