Quotes About Authenticity

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.

Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?

I feel alive for the first time in years. I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago. For a little while I'm not afraid. Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you. I suppose I'll have to do even more violent things, exposing myself so I won't fall down on the job and turn scared again

And finally, have you trained well enough so you can say what you want to say without getting hamstrung? Have you written enough so that you are relaxed and can allow the truth to get out without being ruined by self-conscious posturings or changed by a desire to become rich?

It doesn't have to be the greatest. It does have to be you.

The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.

when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

Be your own self. Love what YOU love.

Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings, or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.

I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people.

When you strip all the clothes away and the doodads, you have two human beings who were either happy or unhappy together, and we have no complaints.

It doesn't have to be the greatest but it does have to be you.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

But Clarisse's favorite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I've really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.

Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?

live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.' 

Este libro tiene poros. Tiene rasgos. Si lo examina usted con un microscopio, descubrirá vida bajo la lente; una corriente de vida abundante e infinita. Cuantos más poros, cuantos más pormenores vivos y auténticos pueda usted descubrir en un centimetro cuadrado de una hoja de papel, más letrado es usted.

Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn't just get up from the sty.

Don't let them take your crying, turn it upside down and use it for their own smile! I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.

And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.