Mustafa Ali Quotes

What once was an expression of who I was - acting - also became my hiding place.

I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.

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.

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.

I became an actor so I didn't have to be myself.

I manage to hide in my movies.

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

I benefit from the Mr. Potato Head syndrome. Put a wig and a nose and glasses on me, and I disappear.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

I do everything in the third person. Performance is about being someone else.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

No one knows me with dark hair.

I wasn't perfect and didn't have it together. I felt alone. So through acting, I decided to be a shape shifter and with every role become the character instead of being myself. It meant about 10 years of no one knowing I was the same person in every movie.

I do constantly get to change the way I look, which is sort of an old-school idea of acting.

Halloween is all about being bold, daring, and creative! You get to be someone else for the night thanks to makeup and a costume. I pretty much do that on the daily, so I am not that big on Halloween, but I do appreciate a good costume and some incredible makeup.

I always drastically changed my look for each role. It's gotten a little tedious in real life, also, because there's no hiding.

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

Our persona was not created by accident; it was created in order to camouflage the parts of ourselves we deemed the most undesirable and to overcompensate for what we believe to be our deepest flaws. What persona are you hiding behind?

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 always try and stay one step ahead of people, not looking like I looked like last week, so I can be as anonymous as possible and part of it is just for me. It is fun to just come up with new and bizarre colors for each area of your body and things like that, but there are some parts of it that I just keep wanting to negate myself. I hate waking up in the morning and recognizing the woman in the bathroom mirror.

The skeptics said you can't put on a costume in the middle of New York - which isn't true, because everyone's in a costume here.

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.

We'd all like to be taken for what we'd like to be.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

I'm not quite at the point where I feel the need to wear disguises in public.