Public Self Quotes

It's even rougher for the kids today because they have social media - it's as if they're being interviewed every moment of the day even when they're just interviewing themselves, putting out a tweet or an Instagram post.

Me just being myself in public or on TV is the biggest nightmare in the world.

I don't like seeing myself on television. I don't like it.

Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

I think everybody has a public persona. We all present ourselves.

Music is the most private place in my life, but it's become the most public part of who I am.

It took a lot of years for me to get comfortable, strutting my stuff, dancing like a fool, having that sparkly dress on that says, 'Here I am.'

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale.

I can't stand to see myself on television.

My first and strongest memories about perfume come from childhood, from my mother, and they are a complex blend of her private and public selves.

If I don't like seeing myself on the screen, I think when I start seeing that, that's when I think I'll stop.

I think you can decide how much of yourself you're willing to make public.

I like the experience of being in a shoot, and I'm a total exhibitionist, but I don't like to look at them.

It's odd seeing yourself on screen at all.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

I lost my public self, or had it stolen. In a way, it was a form of identity theft.

All major publishing houses have these big fat biographies sitting there, waiting for people to die. All you have to do is slap on the end and put in on the market. It's that kind of commoditization and completion of your life before you die - and this kind of imposition of a public idea of self that replaces the actual living self - that I find so frightening.

No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there.

I think of myself as actually kind of prudish and girly, but I don't know if a lot of other people would see me that way.

As a child, people were always trying to photograph and film me because it's a way for a shy person to find themselves.

There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self.

I love changing what I look like because I always feel super strange whenever I do watch something that I'm in.

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

I think all of us feel like we're a bit on show, all the time.

If you become aware of a public self, you're in danger of becoming a very artificial person.