Ezra Pound Quotes

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

As actors, we get to hide. You can change your hair and your accent, and it's not you. You have tricks, these masks.

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

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

Masks are what they seem to be; not so the faces beneath them.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

The whole point of wearing a disguise was to be seen wearing her.

I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.

Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

I'm always in disguise in one form or another in my plays.

It is a career of make-believe, of masks. We all have masks in life.

As an actor, we spend so much putting the mask on and trying to be someone you're not.

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.

Putting on someone else's clothes is like putting on a mask.

What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the actors into what they are not. We ask the public to believe that every time they see a performer on the screen, he's become a different person.

I know this sounds kind of crazy, but I think we're all actors.

I don't know what else I could do but pretend to be an actor.

Life is a masquerade.

We all have split personalities; we all wear masks at some point in our careers.

The plays I choose to work on are about having masks. We all have masks in life, but there is a different inner life going on. The audience has to work hard to see what is going on. I love what is not on display.