Quotes About Authenticity

To the world, I'm Bow Wow. When I leave here and I go to L.A., and I go to my daughter's house and I sit with her, I feel like Shad. I'm not Bow; I'm 'Daddy.' It's, like, the illest feeling in the world. I feel like I'm away from everything.

I can sit in my room and write a song that I think might be a hit. I can sort of make myself do that, and then I'll play it to a friend, and they'll say, 'Oh, that's nice.' But when something happens to me, and I sit down and write a song to get rid of my emotions, they'll turn around and say, 'Wow, that's great.'

You get people who rap about stuff that they don't do all day long. Half those guys, you hear them on the radio, and then you meet them, and you're like, 'Wow. They're so sweet.'

I don't think any prosecutor should walk into a courtroom and think they're going to wow a jury with catchphrases and cliches and that kind of performance.

Sometimes people look at television personalities and say, 'Wow, they've never had any problems.' And I really wanted people to know that hadn't been my path. I want people to know the real me underneath.

Everyone likes to have fun. But when I look back on my life, I'm not going to say, 'Oh, we're the crazy party animals.' I'll look back and say, 'Wow, we did take this seriously.' We had fun while we were out doing it, but it's just the only thing you read about: 'They're a bunch of party animals.' To be honest, that's not true.

You can ask me about my beliefs on things; that's cool. But I think to lump in and say, You follow this person, so then, wow, who are you?' Ask me who I am.

That was everything to me as a kid. When I'd see someone on MTV, it was like, 'Wow, they're the real deal.'

I feel like people being themselves and not being scared of judgment, they're putting that into their music, and it's like, 'Wow, they came up with something fire because they didn't care how you were going to feel about it. They didn't care if you were going to like it or not.'

My goal in talking about my sexuality publicly is just so that a scared little girl or little boy can see me do it and think, 'wow, if she did it, then maybe it's OK that I do it.' It's to encourage people to be themselves.

You know in acting you have those moments in a movie where a character yells or breaks down crying and you're like, wow, that's acting?

WOW and Impact are both different brands, but Tessa Blanchard never changes. I'm the same Tessa Blanchard there as with Impact.

Most people when they see me cry for a shot, say, 'Wow, what a natural!' But I actually do cry and break down.

Rap was started by black people and, thus, is at the foundation of black culture. So people cannot always wrap their minds around someone like me being inspired by it. But if you listen to the things we're saying, they're authentically us.

It's a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around the C word: celebrity. Rock stars are celebrities because they're larger than life. As an actor, you have to play the everyman and the everygirl. If you start treating people in the real world like assistants, that's not a good look. But my friends keep me grounded.

People relate to things that feel real to them. All the good, happy, over-sexed and moneyed endings on TV are not the way most of us feel in our lives. The success of 'E.R.,' I think, is not relying on overly sentimental stories that are solved where people's lives wrap up nicely with happy endings.

'If Our Love Is Wrong' is, quite simply, my coming out song, as I was trying to wrap my head around my sexuality and was starting to learn about songwriting, and that my honesty and my authenticity came from my personal experiences and writing about stuff that genuinely bugged me or upset me.

My father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody's mantle. He never felt the need to pretend to be anybody else. This is their administration. This is their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, well, they're no Ronald Reagans, that's for sure.

It's not so uncommon for me to get so wrapped up in a song that I cry several times when I sing them. That's the difference between my music and some of the other folks.

What matters is discovering myself under the veneer, under the layers that are wrapped around me. There are two 'yous'; there's 'you', the real you, and then there's the image.

Good writing shouldn't be wrapped in cellophane. It should be open to the elements and full of maggots and it should be left to grow and deepen and fester.

Don't treat your heart like an action figure wrapped in plastic and never used. And don't try to give me that nerd argument that your heart is a 'Batman' with a limited-edition silver bat-erang and therefore if it stays in its original packing it increases in value.

I think, especially living in L.A., it's very easy to get wrapped up in weekend announcements and the trades and the whole social life of the city, and to get divorced from what actually matters.

When I was living an almost mechanical lifestyle as an idol, I was constantly wrapped up in thoughts about who I was. That's when I entered a phase in which I was trying to discover myself. Because I was able to get past that difficult phase, I now realize how important it is to protect myself and my identity.