Learned Hand Quotes

I'm not a big fan of just cultivating an image.

You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are.

We all present a version of ourselves whether you've got a puppet on your hand or not. To actually be very real out there in a public way, why?

There is no way you can get people to believe you on screen if they know who you really are through television.

I don't think I have a black-hat image.

The more you are known, the more difficult it is to hide behind characters.

People feel like they know me from the work I have done, but it's not me.

I don't want to be thought of as wholesome.

What most people do is try to find a comfortable persona that they're in alignment with and the public likes and appreciates them for.

My public image is absolutely not a fair reflection of who I am.

Some people are really good at packaging themselves, but that's not really me.

Nixon's pretense was to be less than he was—less thoughtful, less introverted, less skeptical and analytical, less cerebral—to present himself deliberately as an Average American: patriotic, conventionally religious and responsible, gregarious, sports-loving, hardworking and hard-nosed.

No one's reputation is quite what he himself perceives it ought to be.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

When I was in politics, I always got accused of image-making and trying to make them something they weren't. Truth was - and nobody ever discovered it, although I was in that business for twenty years - what I was trying to do was to get them to be themselves.

People always want to get behind the image on the screen, and I'm not sure there is one. I don't put on an act.

Having the name 'Bloomberg' doesn't help me in any way... and it really is a disadvantage and takes away from the image I'm trying to portray.

I never tried to put myself in situations where I had to be anything other than what people saw on TV.

I ain't want my kids to grow up and call me Thug. I don't want anybody to kind of look at me like that. So I'm gonna just use my real name.

My reputation is a media creation.

For the people that I love I only have one face but for some people we can't have one face.

The more I protest that I'm not Lemony Snicket, and that I'm Daniel Handler instead, the more it becomes clear to the audience that I am in fact Lemony Snicket, that I am in fact standing in front of them.

I'm a New York person. I've never gone out of the way to speak to the press to change my persona - I probably should have. It's too late now. But when I first started I was like, "I'm gonna stay this way. I'm gonna be this way," and I continued to. I probably should have sugarcoated it like, "This is not really the way I am - I'm an actor."

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.