Quotes About Identity

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'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

You see, to tall men I'm a midget, and to short men I'm a giant; to the skinny ones I'm a fat man, and to the fat ones I'm a thin man.

I've felt that if I just used initials nobody would know whether I was a man or a woman, a dog or a tiger. I could hide from view, like a bat on the underside of a branch.

All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn't a tragedy. But you need a hell of a sense of humor to handle it.

You're not such a dog as you think you are.

I get plenty of, 'Is that song about me?' from men but I just tell them to get over themselves.

I saw my bulky person in the windows of the passing storefronts and wondered, when will that man there find himself to be loved?

And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.

The world and man are identical. This is why racism is the most stupid thing in the world.

Because Man is God, and God is Man, the world is nothing but the world of Man - or Woman.

Men astonish themselves far more than they astonish their friends.

Clothes do not make the man; friends and engagement with life do.

Men at an earlier age, get the feminine aspects of them wrung out in a variety of ways.

The proper Science and Subject for Man's Contemplation is Man himself. [Fr., La vraie science et le vrai etude de l'homme c'est l'homme.]

Ah, though a Roman, I am not less a man.

Nearly every black man faces an unacceptable level of violence in this society. I'm not different. Money can shield you; it can protect you. But it doesn't make you white.

Some athletes are super fashionable and not good. It's like c'mon man focus on your craft, be who you're supposed to be and then go put on the clothes.

I am a stereotype. I am an effeminate man.

Michelangelo worked from within. He described not the excitements of touching or seeing a man but the excitement of being Man.

Most men when they make up their faces, the makeup stands forward, and their faces are behind.

I look at Homer and The Odyssey and all the disparate adventures this guy goes through, and then he returns home and the question is, is he the same man who left?