Quotes About Authenticity

I thought I needed to go to one of the top five schools in the nation and never even thought 'What's important to me?' Instead of figuring out what was important, which was obviously being near home, I kind of just went with what everyone thought I should do.

I feel like if you sit down and have an assistant engineer and a producer in a top-notch studio and everyone sets up all the mikes perfect, all of a sudden it's really hard to live that melancholy song. It's hard to really live it in the moment.

I did quite a lot of research for 'Phobia' because it's a very sensitive topic, so I couldn't have just faked it.

I truly believe heavy metal has gone south. Too many people are focusing on, will the songs be on the radio, will the shirt be in Hot Topic?

I think we just need to stick to our knitting on the topics and the subjects the American people care about.

I think with being so honest and real with not just the guys I was having relationships with but with America, I have a lot to give, so I'm excited to be able to use my platform to continue talking to people about these topics that I had to deal with on national television.

You know when you hear a lyric and you can tell that the person means it? That is really hard; that is so much harder than it seems: to find the topics that you're passionate about and have it come across as like, 'Yeah, that guy needed to sing that song.'

Prior to stepping on stage, I prefer to continue being myself, whether that is making jokes with others, talking about other non-bodybuilding topics, or just sitting around listening to music.

I don't want to take off my shirt and roam topless all the time, just for the heck of it.

I wear crop tops and stuff, but I genuinely like that style, so it's just has to be genuine. Once you start getting to that world where you're using sexuality to try to propel something, you're losing the moment. You've lost; people are not focusing on that anymore.

Being a tomboy worked to my advantage in fashion. I'm known as the androgynous girl - I've used it in a way that works for me. I've never felt a pressure to change myself. I do own a few Rick Owens dresses - they're more like long tank tops, though.

It's a great stretch for me to do my game show. It's very hard. It's not me at all. The only part that's me is sort of when I'm sitting in the booth looking tormented. That's the only part that's the real me.

My cousin, Rip Torn, persuaded me not to change my name. You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success.

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

I hate wearing make-up, I hate doing my hair. With events and everything, you dress up so much that you get exhausted. So, whenever I go to Delhi, I'm in my dad's oversized shirt and torn shorts.

I may wear sizzling costumes on screen or on the ramp, but back home, I love to be in my torn jeans and sneakers.

No offense to the Canadians, but I believe location is like a character, and authenticity really matters. When you're in a place like New York or D.C., you just can't beat it, and it's so hard to recreate because they are both such distinctive places. I think it's pretty easy these days to tell films that are shot in Toronto.

And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

Perhaps the right to authenticity and the reverence of authenticity should be reserved for people like John McCain. John McCain who at his most authentic chose to stay and face years of torture rather than leave before his brothers.

I'm not tortured and neurasthenic - I'm really not.

He kind of makes me ill, David Cameron. I liked the old-fashioned Tory - like Winston Churchill, who had style. But Cameron's like a new breed - computer-generated. I hate it.

Typically, actors overplay jargon or toss it away in an extravagant display of casualness. Real people hit the important parts hard.

One of the things with the second record, a word I held close to my chest was 'brave.' To take chances to go outside the box and explore. To continue to toss off any expectation that our fans or anyone else might have of us, to just tap into who I am as a writer and artist and really just operate within that freedom of creation.

Depression, for me, wasn't a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell, and now the shell wasn't there. It was total exposure.