Social Performance Quotes

Life is a masquerade.

I figured if I played in the no-man's land of intimacy, I would learn to be a performer.

I act like I'm always in a good mood when I'm not, but it's my job.

Every American was to become a performing self.

I just think, as a model, it's taught me to be a master of deception and illusion.

I've never personally differentiated a person who dressed up in a three-piece suit and goes to Wall Street from a person who dresses up in a polyester uniform and works at McDonalds. I think it's all drag.

I realise there are situations where I camp it up, make myself into a sort of novelty character to ease things along. Like, if I ever feel uncomfortable in a situation, I can just make myself into this funny Will-and-Grace-guest-star type of person, and maybe people will not pay attention to the deeper things going on.

In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be--and thus the world is merely composed of actors.

Online you're encouraged to perform one personality for everyone.

It's really fun to act like a bimbo. But it's fun to act like a bimbo only when people know that you really aren't one.

I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is constantly acting a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native character are refined away or softened down by the levelling influence of what is termed good-breeding, and he practises so many petty deceptions and affects so many generous sentiments for the purposes of popularity that it is difficult to distinguish his real from his artificial character.

A sociopath doesn't warm up their environment, doesn't make it cozy. They don't have to; when they're not performing, when they're not manipulating, when they're all alone, there's nothing.

It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.

It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.

I'm not out here trying putting on an act like I'm crazy. In my opinion, everyone else is crazy. They're the ones who put on an act for you, doing what they're told in front of the camera.

We all present versions of ourselves. The person you are at work is not the same person you are at home. The face we present in our most intimate relationships is not the face we present to the world.

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

I try to look cool. I strategize. Sometimes it's like - that's part of the strategizing, to make it seem like I don't think about it.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

For me, in some ways, my whole life is a bit performative and always has been - because I'm stared at and looked at everywhere I go.

We all in real life put on these masks - we don't swear when we're around certain people... When we come home, when you're on your own I'm sure you're really different than when you're with your boss.

A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases we have a sense in which the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be performer and observer of the same show. Presumably he introcepts or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that even in their absence his conscience requires him to act in a socially proper way.