Emily Dickinson Quotes

All photographs are self-portraits.

Ice Cube is the piece of me that I give away to the public.

I do not want to play a character who is exactly like me.

My videos represent the artist in me very well, but not the kind of woman I am.

A rapper is about being completely true to yourself. Being an actor is about changing who you are.

A writer appears in everything that he does. That said, I felt like writing characters with my own name, in fact, provided me with something of a smoke screen.

The Anne you see on TV is me; I don't have an on-camera persona.

I'm acting a lot when I'm writing for other people.

A rap dude has his rap persona, his hyper version of himself. Do you know Method Man's real name? Or Elton John, Marylin Monroe? You make up this character. That's kind of what we have done with Die Antwoord, playing with characters.

I want to represent my name to the fullest: Ginuwine.

I don't feel like I'm writing music for gay people. I'm a gay man who is writing music about one tiny little experience of what it's like to be a human on this planet.

What I've noticed about Hollywood is, if you go out there shouting about who you are, they will love you for it. But if you go out not knowing what it is that you're representing, and you are just a canvas, they will make you into the thing they need you to be.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

A lot of people mistake the persona that I create in poetry and fiction with me. A lot of people claim to know me who don't really know me. They know the work, or they know the persona in the work, and they confuse that with me, the writer. They don't realize that the persona is also a creation and a fabrication, a composite of my friends and myself all pasted together.

We're actors in our lives, pretendin' to be who we want people to think we are.

I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part. What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?

The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?

One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

It's not a real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants.

I'm asking the reader to suspend reality with me and entertain the idea that the person writing is not me. In order to do that well, I think, one needs to point out the artifice of the narrative. Somehow if the narrator is self-aware then it's almost more humanizing and more relatable.

This week, I'm a gypsy. Maybe next week it'll be glitter rock.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.