The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
813.
The modern artist who, in his physiology, is next of kin to the hysteric, may also be classified as a character belonging to this state of morbidness. The hysteric is false,--he lies from the love of lying, he is admirable in all the arts of dissimulation,--unless his morbid vanity hood-wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever which is in need of stupefying drugs, and which recoils from no self-deception and no farce that promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The incapacity for pride and the need of continual revenge for his deep-rooted self-contempt, this is almost the definition of this man's vanity.) The absurd irritability of his system, which makes a crisis out of every one of his experiences, and sees dramatic elements in the most insignificant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm reflection; he ceases from being a personality, at most he is a rendezvous of personalities of which first one and then the other asserts itself with barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he is great as an actor _i_ all these poor will-less people, whom doctors study so profoundly, astound one through their virtuosity in mimicking, in transfiguration, in their assumption of almost any character required.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.