Quotes About Identity

Social media technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, twitter, text messages to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one.

Bowie drew our attention to the fact that a person could play the part of a rock star before actually becoming one.

Being a (male) Bowie fan meant that your schoolmates branded you a 'poof', too.

I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song 'China Girl', it better sound Asian. You call a song 'Let's Dance', you damn well better make sure people dance to it.

Etiketleme, sadece y?k?c? de?il, mant?ks?zd?r da.Birey olarak siz, yapt???n?z tek bir ?eyle ölçülemezsiniz. Hayat?n?z karma??k ve sürekli olarak de?i?en bir dü?ünceler, duygular ve hareketler ak???d?r. Ba?ka bir deyi?le, bir heykelden çok bir nehirsiniz.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shackAnd you may find yourself in another part of the worldAnd you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobileAnd you may find yourself in a beautiful house… with a beautiful wifeAnd you may ask yourself, "Well… how did I get here?"

So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?" Letting the days go by...

I ride on the shoulder of a road that is lined with chain stores, none of them specific to this area. Everyone who works in them is therefore an employee hired by some anonymous distant corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have almost no stake or investment in the place where they work.

music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human.

Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. It's just a part of discovering who you are; it's nothing special.

Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.

I have no time for those who say there is no way Scotland could go it alone. I know first-hand the contribution Scotland and Scots make to Britain's success - so for me there's no question about whether Scotland could be an independent nation.

I knew they were mine because they became so in tiny steps across my soul.

You can't become normal by pretending you are.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that can not be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to share. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience.