Roland Barthes Quotes

From the age of 8, I learned that nothing in the entertainment industry is real. It's all fake. Your face, your clothes, what you say - it's all a fake.

Being is like pretending.

That's what show business is, sincere insincerity.

Everyone thinks Lily Allen is this brash, bold, funny person. It was all just a bit of a facade and bravado.

I once told someone I could act. They totally bought it. I've been getting away with it ever since.

Image is powerful, but image is also superficial.

Well, you know what they say in Hollywood - the most important thing is being sincere, even if you have to fake it.

I'm a firm believer that character is highly overrated. Character is a trick that we do with the audience's collusion.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

The less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen.

Style equals pretense.

When I present those clip shows and movie mistakes and things, the persona the writers adopt for me is unimpressed, superior, very sarcastic - I'm not any of that. I can do it, but that's not what I'm like.

It’s not only what you do in politics. It’s what you appear to do.

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

I basically believe that all pop stars create personas and manipulate them. What we relate to are not their real selves; they are projections, which tend to shift in shape.

Thus 'tis with all; their chief and constant care Is to seem everything but what they are.

Outward appearances mean everything.

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, 'Twas only when he was off, he was acting.

In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

I look much more civilized than I actually am.

Maybe I'm like acts of Congress or your favorite Chinese restaurant - you don't really want to know what's going on behind the door. I'm a real study in contrast, I expect, looking from without. But it adds up to what you get on stage.