When I was a kid in San Diego, I would read fashion magazines and Interview magazine, and all of that really inspired me to create a persona. So by the time I moved to New York, in the early '80s, I'd learned how to create a persona, and I knew what my persona would be.
A lot of people mistake the persona that I create in poetry and fiction with me. A lot of people claim to know me who don't really know me. They know the work, or they know the persona in the work, and they confuse that with me, the writer. They don't realize that the persona is also a creation and a fabrication, a composite of my friends and myself all pasted together.
I'm creatively driven to create a body of work. I was made to put on this Earth to wrestle and perform. Create a legacy, create this Villain persona to put down in the history books for people to watch for many years to come.
There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
You show up at high school, there's all these kids you don't know, and you're terrified that people will have some kind of wrong or unpleasant impression of you. You just don't want anything to ruin your public persona, because you actually have a public persona in high school.
I had a persona as a player, and I know this will come as a shock, but I liked to talk. But don't let the persona overshadow the person. The persona liked to have fun. The person knew when it was time to get to work.
In 1965, Cosby had become the first black man ever to star in a prime-time television show; he was conscious enough of his non-dissolved, traditional nuclear family that he made it the foundation of his public persona, his comedy act, and eventually of his blockbuster sitcom.
People have told me, 'It's part of your act, you're big, it's part of your persona.' Well, as I've lost weight, my act has grown.
There is a blueprint that young female singers seem to follow to make it, to make some noise when they first come out. And it's a hyper-sexualized persona. And the thing is that it works. And they do make noise. But the problem is if it's not authentic to you, then you're trapped in that persona. And you have to live that persona 24/7.
People around me tell me that I need a bigger persona and to act a little more A-listy because 'that's where you are but you don't act that way, so people undervalue you.' But that's not me.
On telly, if it's not the right kind of show, I revert back to my 'Girlie Show' persona, become this daft, bawdy caricature of myself and I'm not actually like that, I'm actually quite - not clever, but smart with my words.
I'm not trying to create an image or a persona. I'm just singing because that's what I know how to do.
I believe that Maryse's persona was the best female persona in years within the WWE.
There is your persona and then there's the real you. I was living inside my persona too much.
There's the private persona and the public persona and the two shall never meet.