Quotes About Authenticity

because letter-writing requires more of me than just the basic wherewithal:

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly, and over and over again you said be.

If we imagine our being as a room of any size, it seems that most of us know only a single corner of that room, a spot by the window, a narrow strip on which we keep walking back and forth. That gives a kind of security. But isn't insecurity with all its dangers so much more human? We are not prisoners of that room.

This again is one of the hardest tests of the creative individual: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he would not rob them of their ingenuousness and untouchedness!

What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.

Gehen Sie in sich. Erforschen Sie den Grund, der Sie schreiben heißt; prüfen Sie, ob er in der tiefsten Stelle Ihres Herzens seine Wurzeln ausstreckt, gestehen Sie sich ein, ob Sie sterben müssten, wenn es Ihnen versagt würde zu schreiben.

A work of art is good if it is arisen out of necessity

I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it--that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way--part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate--I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

I yam what I yam!

My God, boy! You're black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate—I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was...I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself.