Jean de la Bruyere Quotes

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

I'm not really an impersonator.

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

Every character, no matter who you play, at times is pretending to be somebody else. People have a public face and a private face.

People don't recognize me from gig to gig. They have no idea. But, that's really what I strive to do. I strive to stip myself down completely and build another human and become them.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

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.

The more you are known, the more difficult it is to hide behind characters.

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

No one is ever who they purport to be.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?

Very few of us are what we seem.

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

When I do an impression of someone or when I am pretending to be someone else, something freaky happens: I feel the person I am mimicking behind my eyeballs. Their head is sitting perfectly inside mine, helping me project a false self out on to the world. And it's not always a choice.

Imagine taking off your makeup and nobody knows who you are.

When making a record, I could done a new face pretty easily and use all these different devices to hide who I am - or who I was - which really had very little to do with what I was trying to convey.

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.

I am not what you see and hear.

We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.

I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.

The trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting.

Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.

I feel like I'm kind of faking something if I'm talking as myself and putting on an accent.

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else.