Quotes About Authenticity

The burden of originality is one that most people don't want to accept. They'd rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they're supposed to like, what they're supposed to buy, and what they're supposed to laugh at.

But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

I'm a confession that is waiting to be heard

I never said to be like me, I say to be like you and make a difference.

morals are worn as a badge to make you look good and [...] it's so much easier to talk about your beliefs than to live up to them

I knew that I was supposed to respond with some kind of mannered phrase that ended with hail Satan, but I couldn't bring myself to do so. It seemed too empty and ritualistic, like wearing a uniform in a Christian school.

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

Beneath the makeup and behind the smile I am just a girl who wishes for the world.

I want to grow old without facelifts. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made.

The Lord gave you a mind so that you can make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

When the lord says you must 'become as one of these little ones,' I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretence and triviality.

I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don't do that. In your own way, you're kind of—pure.

That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.

She thought, If I'm crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway.

I am saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment

I think that to be a good writer, you have to put yourself on the line, you have to think deeply about what is meaningful to you and you have to make a good-faith effort to speak from the integrity of your own deep experience.... People don't think about assessing what is the deepest narrative for them. I think that that's about 99 percent of the subject of literature.... Write from it.

In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you're pretty.

She said, "I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don't do that. In your own way, you're kind of—pure.

Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...

think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together.

I don't write the way I speak. I'm afraid you would think I didn't know any better. I don't write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.

I'll tell you the only real truth. Cunt is where it all begins and where it all ends. Cunt is the only thing worth living for. Everything else is a fake, a fraud and just shit.

Actions defined a man; words were a fart in the wind.

The world is what it is, and you are what you are.