Quotes About Authenticity

I used to hate touring, I used to absolutely hate it! I think one of the reasons why was because in between songs I found it difficult to talk to the audience, and now I don't care, I say what I want!

The thing about tourism is that the reality of a place is quite different from the mythology of it.

Goa isn't just about tourism and happy faces.

The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists.

Go to Mozambique! As long as you don't expect to find flawless infrastructure, just go. Because this is a country where people have not quite grown accustomed to tourists. You still feel a genuineness that no longer exists in countries where tourism has been industrially developed.

For years I've wanted to write about the Australian countryside, but, like most Australians, I've only got a tourist's knowledge of it. I thought that if I disobeyed that basic rule of writing - write about what you know - I'd write a thin and inauthentic book.

I'm not really a tourist attraction kind of guy.

The sheeplike nature of travel - being on a beach with thousands of other people is not my idea of fun. I also don't like being a tourist because you don't know what's really going on in a country.

No, I don't want to be a brand. Brand means I cannot go out for a quiet walk without tourists and fans constantly following me.

My father didn't compete ever in martial arts tournaments because they were not real. They were tag tournaments or touch tournaments, which he thought was bizarre and not really what the martial arts is about.

Book tours are super hard for me as a raging introvert. I love humanity, but actual humans are hard for me. So something like a book tour - where I'm constantly on the road - scares the hell out of me.

I would never take part in one of those Eighties nostalgia tours, although I've been asked many times, because it's like admitting you have nothing new to offer. As long as I can keep making music I'm happy with, and people want to come to my gigs to hear it, I'll carry on.

I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are.

I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.

Once, Pee-wee Herman tweeted a photo of this guitar I made that's shaped like a slice of pizza, and it meant a lot to me. People downplay it, but there's power there, people reaching toward each other and toward truth. Any mechanism, any resource that we can use to further that reach, is part of the human destiny.

I always remind myself that my audience is human. Therefore we have to be human, play human, reveal the humanness of who we are. Audiences gravitate towards that.

I'm a fan of real singers. I just gravitate towards that.

You don't want to be acting your way towards something. The sense of believability has to be great, so bringing it as close to yourself as you can always helps.

I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.

I think it is important to differentiate between lip service towards something and actually making change.

The connect that I have with the audience comes from my hard work and sincerity towards my craft and also because of the opportunities that I have had. I have been able to engage with my audiences. They observe my performances minutely. They think I will do some magic on screen. They like me because I don't do over-the-top acting.

I don't like to go trampling on other people's sounds. That's really about it - I don't gravitate towards it, I try to move away from it.

I do find that when I see women who flesh out the television or film world and make it look more like the world I actually live in, I gravitate towards those characters.

If you have a movie that doesn't strive to go to a certain emotional point, you can do anything and it will be fine and funny. But if you have something pretty emotional at its core, you have to make it right. You don't want it overwrought or unearned. Everything has to be moving towards this one thing.