Contrasting Perceptions Quotes

Everyone's like, 'Oh, you must live in L.A., the glamorous life,' and I really don't. I'm in a small house, in Pittsburgh, in the snow.

Some call it schizophrenia, I call it a career

People think I'm so strong, but I'm very shy.

People are always so surprised when they meet me. Firstly, that I'm 'so tiny', and secondly that I'm 'so sweet'. They seem surprised that they're not scared of me.

I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfortable.

People who don't know me think I'm easy-going, but I'm a pessimist by nature and an old curmudgeon.

No two people see things the same way.

Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives of those outside the law may sometimes be found concealed honesty and naive ideals.

People have always thought of me as someone who's very classical,when in fact I've led a rather unconventional life.

When most people think of Woodrow Wilson, they see a dour minister's son who never cracked a smile, where in fact he was a man of genuine joy and great sadness.

Contrary to public opinion and the image people have of me, I grew up in a very lower-middle-class, blue-collar environment 40 minutes outside of New York until I was 11.

The real Paul Hollywood is shy.

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

Joe Rogan has this podcast where he's talking astrophysics and lean BMI indexes and weird philosophy most of the time and yet, when you see him onstage, you're like, 'Oh, this guy is just a killer comedian.'

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

I'd always heard stories about how Harpo Marx was the most talkative of the Marx brothers. I found it interesting that someone you never got to hear speak in films would never not speak in real life.

I am strong-willed, which can be annoying sometimes. And from that I think people assume I have confidence and Hollywood glamour and all that stuff, when actually, in my personal life, sometimes I'm just a goofball.

People often think of New York as a city, a concrete jungle with soaring skyscrapers and yellow taxis and the bright lights of Times Square. And it is that, in part. But beyond that, it's rolling hills of fruit orchards and fields of grain and ice-cold waters brimming with oysters.

I had multiple circles of friends around the world. Some circles were really wild and I was affectionately known by them as 'the nerdy one.' And, with other friends, I was regarded as the wild one.