Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

I think for the longest time I used to be kind of embarrassed that if I hung out with someone that had a really, really strong personality, I would end up accidentally catching myself talking like them.

I call myself a chameleon.

It depends on whom I'm with. Sometimes I start out in my own voice, and no matter who I'm with, I take on their thing.

I thought the best thing you were supposed to do was find somebody and try to sound like them.

Whoever imitates a people is one of them.

For me a chameleon is something that disguises itself to look as much like its environment as possible. I always thought I did exactly the opposite of that.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

I'm Russian Jewish. And I had to grow up really quickly.

You are bound to pick up influences.

Human beings all mimic each other.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

Everybody in life is a chameleon.

I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.

A familiar question for Australians is how much we are a product of our circumstances, and how much we are what we have made ourselves to be. In truth, by the act of migration the country was made: by that voluntary act and by the emigrants' ambitions it was built.

Children are all foreigners.

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

Being an immigrant myself, but feeling very American, and also being the child of immigrants, I understand the feeling of wanting a home.

I love being a foreigner.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I have been 'absorbing' people - their voices, their mannerisms - all my life, to the point where I am a sort of Frankenstein of different people. My own speaking voice is, in fact, a mixture of how my two best mates speak, because they are cool, and I am not.

I like the idea that something happens to everybody who comes to L.A. - whether they are Mexican, Irish, black, or hillbillies. You come here, and you leave all your traditions behind. And since there's no traditions here, you just make one up.

If you want to fit in, you try to mirror whatever anyone wants from you.

I can kind of be a chameleon.

Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.