Keegan-Michael Key Quotes

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

I've basically thought of myself as a writer, whether I was or not.

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

There is no self-portrait of me.

There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

Everyone thinks they're the hero in their own story.

When we uplift artists who reflect diverse perspectives their stories not only tell us how people view others, but how they view themselves.

People are the story they tell themselves.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

I’ve always thought that each person invented himself… that we are each a figment of our own imagination. And some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.

We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

Maybe that's why people take pictures of themselves, to avoid being described.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.