George Akerlof Quotes

I don't believe we have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time.

People expect me to be that guy. But I'm more east London boy than east Baltimore.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

If I try and be something I am not, if I try and be cool, and I am not, I am a boring white man in a suit. Usually a pin-striped suit.

The thing that keeps me being a performer is my interest in society's obsession with identity, because I'm not sure that I really believe identity exists.

The image is never created by you. It's created by the media, by the people around you. In my real-life self, I would be without make up and in jeans and a T-shirt. But when I'm outside, I'm dressed up. It's not because I enjoy doing it.

'Nimona' is about identity and if who you are is defined by what you look like. It's not a book about body image at all, but I would be lying if I said that wasn't in there even at the conception of it.

Telling others about oneself is...no simple matter. It depends on what we think they think we ought to be like

If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the time.

I think in some ways we have allowed other people to set the agenda. Other people to define who we are.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.

I don't like labels. I don't understand the need for them. When you define yourself a certain way, people have expectations.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long.

Funny how defined we are by how we present ourselves to the world.

You can't get along in society without an identity.

This is not me, WWE doesn't define who Ashley is.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

Drag threatens people because it exposes and mocks identity. Because most people believe that they are what it says they are on their driver's license. But the truth is we are all born naked, and the rest is drag.

I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that.

We had this party in New York, and there were a lot of gay men there dressed up as the characters. I showed up just looking like myself, but it was a real case of shame. They looked so fantastic. We could never quite live up to it.

A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.

I've got a wonky nose. Is it classical, is it not? That's what's hard work, getting down into the nitty-gritty of who are the human beings behind the front of what they present?