Identity Distortion Quotes

Identity is invariably false to facts.

People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.

From a young age, [James Baldwin] was watching all those different films. He's watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That's the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That's the ambivalence of Hollywood.

It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

Nothing is more horrible than my self in the mirror of hysteria. Nothing is more vulgar than my style in the hands of another. Toimitate me is to punish me.

It's very odd to observe someone else taking your identity into their own hands and getting it all wrong. I don't think most people will ever get to experience how truly weird it is.

Anytime you make a person into something other than himself, you make a monster.

There was a company that I did a photo shoot for once that manipulated the photo so much, I was like, "That's not even me." Like, what's the point? You wanted my name, and then you wanted the version of me that I'm not. I absolutely hate it.

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is... a lie.

That doesn't sound like my Margo", she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.

I think, as we go through life, we can sometimes, while still staying essentially true to ourselves, pick up mannerisms or modes of expression that are like curlicues. And there was a lot of that that I recognized sometimes. And I remembered, sometimes dimly, why those phrases felt so tasty to me, why that particular curl felt so good to me. But from my point of view now, it was almost inaccurate. It changed the meaning of what I was saying in a way that it seemed like a distortion.