Richard Avedon Quotes

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

I think, in a lot of ways, we underestimate how much clothing plays a part in achieving our identities and in how we want the world to deal with us.

For me, everything is a performance.

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

I believe your thoughts are your thoughts, but are you a human being in front of the camera, or an actor? They are two different things.

It's all performing; that's what we do in life. We talk, we look, and we hear, and we listen. Your life is a performance.

By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.'

I think the theater is where you stand up, and you say, 'Here is what I have to offer.'

When I'm in drag, I don't always want to be spoken to, but I love being looked at. Nobody puts that much work into how they look to be ignored.

We are all doing drag. Every single person on this planet is doing it.

I know, for a fact, that I'm a very different person on my own than I am with someone else. We are different with each other. These things are constantly adjusted. And that's true of humans. That's not just true of famous people.

Acting is something that we all practice at some time in our lives. We're different people to our mothers, fathers, our friends, people that we hung out together with, people that didn't like us or we didn't like them. We readjust ourselves.

Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me.

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

Everybody is an actor in one way or another. We are all performing certain things.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

The way you get to know yourself is by the expression on other people's faces.

I would much rather watch myself than listen to myself. The moving is second nature, but the listening... that's the art.

Everyone has an identity. One of their own, and one for show.

Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.