Oneohtrix Point Never Quotes

I never liked the name Eldred. Since nobody knew me in New York, I just changed to my middle name.

You're supported by everything in New York if you want to be a performing artist. You come here, you can change your name. You leave home, you come here, you're severed from family obligations - the old identity drops away as soon as you come to New York because you're coming to New York, if you're an artist, to be someone else.

I eventually want to come back to Canada, to disappear, have nobody know me, and just be a writer and do what I want to do.

I thought, possibly, that what I really needed was to go where nobody knew me and start over again, with none of my previous decisions, conversations, or expectations coming with me.

How I'd love to get away from here and be someone else for a while in a place where no one knows or expects certain things from me.

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

What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

It's true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren't going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different.

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

Witness protection just makes for exciting stories and it's a really rich sort of place to grab stories from... people starting over completely, saying goodbye to their lives before... it never ends in terms of story opportunities.

As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.

When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.

Sometimes, when you are in the public eye, you just really need to just be part of the crowd, and look at other people rather than other people look at you.

I thought if I went somewhere where I didn't know anybody and they didn't know me I could start all over again.

I had no real education because I was in and out of schools so I decided that I would completely change my look, change my image, change my name and move to New York.

I think I can lead a pretty anonymous life, yeah.

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.

I learned a lot about self-reinvention. How you can be born Milton Sternberg in the Bronx and then become Monroe Stahr in Hollywood.

When you drive, you can kind of put your identity aside in the passenger's seat because you're not being watched, and you can just be the watcher.

Most of the time I live a fully anonymous life, which is the way I like it.

You got to make the most of your second life. I was born Nayvadius, but now I'm Future. Should I dwell on what Nayvadius was supposed to be? I get a chance to experience life as something else. I wasn't supposed to be like this.

If someone asked if I I'd want no one to recognise me anymore, I'd take that option, I think.

New York was a fantastic place to disappear because no one cares who you are. No one bothers you. In my ten years living there I was never once asked for an autograph or stopped on the street. It was an absolute joy. I gave myself time and space to get to know myself more.