Quotes About Authenticity

The best thing anyone can do is be himself. Everyone was made different by God, and that's the way it should be. And if I were a writer or an announcer starting out, I don't think I'd imitate anybody. I'd try to be whatever I am.

I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

I think it's so fun when I get to work with women writers in particular because we really understand the core story or foundation as women. That's so important to me that the authenticity is there, you know, from the place that I speak from for my women. Having other females with me helps me dig deeper.

I have no ghost writers. I personally write every message and every piece of published mail.

A lot of writers whom I love, admire and call friends share this feeling, which is this fundamental idea that we're frauds. That we will be pushed out on to the stage, and it will be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

The deaf culture is portrayed very accurately on 'Switched at Birth' because the writers did the opposite of the norm. They did their homework before portraying anything on television.

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

I always do a lot of work around characters to make them real people because, oftentimes, they really are a sliver of a person. Even with truly wonderful writers, women characters are there to emote, and they're often incredibly chaste or worthy. Or they're a 'different type of woman', which is the worst.

In all the writers I admire, the common detonator is their courage to walk naked.

The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice.

My friend Danny Clinch, who's a photographer, gave me a big, signed, numbered print of a photo he took of Eddie Vedder in Seattle. It's hung in my writing room where I have posters of writers that inspire me. They're all pointing at me. Tom Waits is like, 'Don't sell out!'

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

It feels as though a very disproportionate number of main characters are writers, because that's what the writer knows. Fair enough. But nothing bothers me more in a movie than an actor playing a writer, and you just know he's not a writer. Writers recognize other writers. Ethan Hawke is too hot to be a writer.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.