Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
I put myself into another world and another identity, and I design not for how my life is but for how my imaginary life is.
As a child actor, you haven't been allowed to be yourself for most of your life; you've been constrained by the demands of your job, your parents, directors. A fictional or amplified version of you exists, but when you're 17, you can't have a debate with yourself about authenticity.
Ariel Pink never really existed because he was always Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, but then people started doing interviews with Ariel Pink as if Ariel Pink existed.
I always wanted to have sort of an alter ego.
I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
It makes a lot of sense to me that I would be a cartoon. I feel like a cartoon as a person. I really, really do.
Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.
They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.
