Quotes About Authenticity

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

I don't care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.

I know I'm not myself with people, […] But am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.

The story must strike a nerve—in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.

I felt I was slumming, in my own life. My task was to ward off the drivel (I felt I was drowning in drivel)—the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromide I heard at home. And the weekly comedy shows festooned with canned laughter, the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games and prize fights—radio, whose racket filled the living room on weekday evenings and much of Saturday and Sunday, was an endless torment.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

There is only so much revealing one can do. For every self-revelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to writing involves a balancing of these incompatible needs.

The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged, and always disappointed.

Before this I had always held back, had never lived freely, not with Pietro, not even with Palmira, but here, where nothing was known, I did not fear judgment, and because Father and I shared the same sensibilities, all the rigidness of my living melted and I felt myself coming into myself. If it was genuine, if it would last, it was a wonderful feeling.

If you can't share your true self with someone, he once told me, you're wasting your time.

Acting is all about finding truth in made-up situations. I know that seems like a paradox, that's why it's hard. An actor's job is to be completely honest while pretending to be someone else, in a place that's dressed up to look like somewhere else, while telling a story that isn't true.

He doesn't speak of love. It's just something he does. Something he is. Love is the something he does while other folks sit around talking about it.

How would you live your life differently if you could start over, what would you do, who would you be, where would you go, what would you embrace?

she would never find happiness in trying to please others if she didn't honor her own gifts.

How simple life was when she stopped trying to do what was expected of her and followed her will.

Like most American women, you do not understand style. It does not mean parading yourself around in the latest fashion, but simply presenting your very best self to the world. Contrary to your belief, this has absolutely nothing to do with physical attributes.

It was a wonder, after so many years of trying to press herself into society's mold, to suddenly suspect that the problem was with the mold, not with her.

I remember she told me she could either spend her time working on a scrapbook about her life, or actually living her life. And she chose to live her life.

To tell the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.

Love isn't always all perfume and magic. It has a physical side, one that has nothing to do with tender feelings, fluttering hearts, sentimental poetry.