Impersonation Quotes

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

As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.

Richard Dawkins

Vytautas Juozapaitis' Don Giovanni filled the performance. The singer won the audience not only with his impeccable impersonation of the gallantly vicious philanderer, but also with his vocal rendition that didn't leave any of the listener's desires unfulfilled.

Vytautas Juozapaitis

Rousseau ... is aesthetically revolted by the trashiness of what, some twenty years ago, David Riesman called the 'other-directed' personality, which he saw becoming ever-more salient in our society. This is the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of the culture, to the extent that he is scarcely a self at all, but, rather, a reiterated impersonation.

Lionel Trilling

The spectator, we might put it, contracts by infection the characteristic disease of the actor, the attenuation of selfhood that results from impersonation.

Lionel Trilling

I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn't. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they're fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes.

P. G. Wodehouse

Psychiatry is institutionalized scientism: it is the systematic imitation, impersonation, counterfeiting, and deception. This is the formula: every adult smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.); hence, to prove that he is an adult, the adolescent smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc). Mutatis mutandis: every science consists of classification, control, and prediction; hence to prove psychiatry is a science, the psychiatrist classifies, controls, predicts. The result is that he classifies people as mad; that he confines them as dangerous (to themselves or others); and that he predicts people's behavior, robbing them of their free will and hence of their very humanity.

Thomas Szasz

I think there's a certain objectivity that comes from being Canadian. You're partly British and partly American; you have a good bird's-eye view of both countries. So much of the comedy that comes out of Canada is impersonation - it's less 'look at me' than it is 'look at me playing other people.'

Eric McCormack

Usually, impersonations come out of something you dig, because you're listening to it over and over. And you kind of start developing... You're really trying to emulate them, then you realize, 'I sound ridiculous doing this. Oh, hey, maybe this is a funny impersonation.'

Alex Borstein

One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.' (Chance the Rapper)

I've got to tell you, I've played real characters before and people always bring up this word 'impersonation,' and I'm never entirely sure what it means.

Toby Jones

In every film, whether it's a fictional character or not, you create an idea of the character and for me I always do a bad impersonation to start with.

Joaquin Phoenix

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

Philip Roth

Perry [Como] gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow.

Clive James

The pattern would have been familiar-bohemian, creative, arty-except that it was even further removed from reality, Romanticism in its furthest decadence; being only an exhausted impersonation of poverty, rebellion and artistic "soul.” For it was the unhappy fact that most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine and like publications.

Thomas Pynchon