Michael Herr Quotes

The Divorce, it's just like any performance that's given where I really just completely lost myself in that life.

It is therapeutic for me to act, to be able to slip into somebody else's skin, and know it's not you, but know that you bring a lot of yourself to it. At times in my life it's provided me with a lot of confusion. It's also provided me with a lot of discovery.

There's something safe about playing a character, but then it's like, 'Who am I underneath it all?'

My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.

I look at that person and I'm like, That's not Kelli White. That's not who I am, who I started out to be.

The woman who made those movies, that's not me. She's someone else.

Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

She wanted to be alone - to think things out - to adjust herself, if it were possible, to the new world in which she seemed to have been transplanted with a suddenness and completeness that left her half bewildered to her own identity.

I'm an amalgamation of what I've needed to be. Part scholar, part rebel, part nobleman, part Mistborn, and part soldier. Sometimes I don't even know myself. I had a devil of a time getting all those pieces to work together. And, just when I'm starting to get it figured out, the world up and ends on me.

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.

[My work is] maybe about me maybe not wanting to be me and wanting to be all these other characters. Or at least try them on.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

I find sometimes it's easy to be myself, sometimes I find it's better to be somebody else.

I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.

I have seen without perceiving I have been another man Let me pierce the realm of glamour So I know just what I am.

I once was the walrus, now I'm John.

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.

I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!