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One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

To what extent do we self-construct, do we self-invent? How do we self-identify, and how mutable is that identity? Like, what if one could be anyone at any time? Well, my characters, like the ones in my shows, allow me to play with the spaces between those questions.

I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.

The self was a very strange concept to me until I came to America, and my child was born with that entitlement, and that just thrilled me.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

I want to know who you are as a person, and then I want you to develop as a whole human being.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

I'm really fascinated by the self and how our selves shift and change over time and in relationship to different people.

Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. It's a nice way to explain the tendency to have one preference about the future, but a very different preference when the future becomes the present.