Whole Crowds of People within One Person

“I think so many people—I’m not talking about athletes in particular, anybody—has to know how to get off the floor. I don’t care how successful you are, how famous you are, how impenetrable you may seem to be from self-doubt or unemployment or popularity ratings…I mean who knows what it’s really like to be Jay Leno or what it’s like to be a person on television who leads nightly news…you know, the private life of [Katie Couric] and her own ups and downs, we don’t know much about that. But if you really got to know her—or anybody we’re talking about—they have many sides—many sides. They show you the perfect, public posturing. But in their off hours, when they’re not on stage, when they’re not up their in the gleaming lights of celebritydom, you have different people. They’re many different people. In any person there are many people. Whole crowds of people within one person, that sometimes show themselves and sometimes fade into the sunlight of their own series of successes and failures.”

—Gay Talese, discussing his book A Writer’s Life on KCRW’s The Treatment (2/21/07)