Claire Messud Quotes

You have to put on more faces to pretend who you are.

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?

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

We all have split personalities; we all wear masks at some point in our careers.

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

Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.

Acting like the person I'm supposed to be has always been the easiest thing for me.

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.

As I get older, I'm sort of fascinated with the idea of somebody who could construct an entire persona for themselves - one that was really, in a lot of ways, fundamentally at odds with who they really were as a person.

We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.

We all put on faces, as Walter White does. We put on faces when we meet our friends, when we meet new people, when we present ourselves in interviews. We try to be who the people we meet want us to be, or who we want to truly be.

It's possible to pretend I'm someone other than who I am, and if I pretend long enough, I can believe it.

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

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

The trouble with a mask is it never changes

Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are.

It was then that I realized that while playing the well-meaning tolerant individual (in short: liberal) garnered you fans and grades, it didn't matter. In my heart and head, I was a fraud.

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

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks.

I worry about making work more important than what I know to be the truth. Throughout all areas of life, we're told how to look, how to act, what to speak, what to wear, what we should have and other people don't have, and we know none of that means anything. Yet these other messages never stop coming.

Once I looked into a mirror at my face I felt like it was completely convincing. I was Salieri.

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.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

I didn't think I could be my imperfect self. I pretended I was Marcia, so I was always playing this role. I became her, but yet I wasn't. It's strange.