Quotes About Authenticity

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

I don't read blogs. I'm living the life they're writing about. So why read about it?

But me writing sad songs doesn't mean I am a sad person.

You get a lot of who you are as a musician across through the music you write. If you're writing your own music, then it's important to be really honest.

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you're working with; otherwise, you're not gonna come out with something that's really you.

I'm always getting texts asking why I'm not responding on Instagram or Facebook, and I'm like, 'It's not me. You're writing to some stranger.'

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

Because I write what I feel the most heavy about. So if there is one day of the week when I feel completely crushed by existential dread, I'll end up writing about it, not the great day I had at the park with my friends. I hope it resonates with people - and it does, with some.

'Walking and Talking' is my autobiography. It's best to do it that way, rather than spend months writing a book that then ends up in the bargain bucket with all the other idiots' autobiographies.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

In the end, all disguises must drop.

Die Wahrheit lässt sich nach Geschmack gestalten Denn Wahrheit ist, was alle dafür halten!

The overdressed traveller betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveller knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.

When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis those who are the most themselves are the victims.

Too much truth got in the way.