A Quote by Melissa Leo

People often expect me to be something other than what I am. — © Melissa Leo
People often expect me to be something other than what I am.
Luckily, I don't have to be anybody but Yolanda, because people don't expect me to be anything other than who I am. For an artist, it's a great place to be.
I wanted to see myself as something different, and I wanted to convince people that I was capable of something other than what they would expect from me.
It always seems crazy to tell people what to expect. That never works! So, I don't know what to say, other than that they can expect me.
People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.
I think that I am misunderstood because people perceive me to be a certain way because I am generational. They expect me to be entitled and expect me to have things early on. I think people misconstrued that honestly.
I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.
I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.
Not that I feel like I have a lack of confidence, it's just good to stand up in front of people who don't really know what to expect. Am I going to say something? Am I going to sing? And often when I do say anything it gets a laugh, because everyone's already used to laughing. So I can seem like I'm actually a funny person.
I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create. Just on the other side of creativity is the nuthouse - and I often notice people looking at me strangely when I am talking out loud, but there is no other way.
I don't. I look my age; and I am my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses and drink spirits?
I don't think of music as being a competition - what I make is exactly what I want it to be for me, and it's not better or worse than anything else. I'm just trying to be the best at what I am, or that I possibly can be. And when I've done that, I feel incredibly confident and there's nothing anyone can see to dampen that, but I don't think that because it means something to me, it has to necessarily mean something to other people.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
Just do what you want more often. Don't be so worried about what other people expect.
I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.
People younger than me trust me. People my age do not. They think I'm up to something. And I've often felt this.
I think that veganism is a totally great choice with incredible benefits, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect other people to be vegan or to expect everybody to be vegan. You can proselytize all you want, but being vegan is a pretty intense choice for a lot of people. You can encourage people to eat vegan more, certainly, and I personally eat vegan quite often.
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