[As a child] I was always pretending to be someone else … historical characters, all those I invented for myself. I act even to this day. It's the old imagination working, a kind of make believe.

I've created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.

To create, I've destroyed myself. I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist there except externally. I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

My characters actually create me instead of the other way around.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.

If I could not assume their character, I could at least conceal my own,

You can pretend to be something other than who you are but eventually you will run out of energy to continue because that’s not authentically you.

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

I create this persona for the show. And that's what it is. I'm an act.

It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.

I am who I pretend to be, and right now I’m pretending to be my own clone.

I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change—to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are.

Be careful who you pretend to be. You might become it.