Quotes About Authenticity

I think I've developed, as many people do, this sense of, 'Don't say the wrong thing, or else people will point at you and laugh.'

Sometimes you have the trends that's not that cool. You may have certain artists portraying these trends and don't really have that lifestyle, and then it gives off the wrong thing. And it becomes kinda corny after awhile. It's really about keeping hip-hop original and pushing away the corniness in it.

People ask about art and commercialism. I think that if someone tries to sell their work at a high price, that is the wrong way of doing it.

I'm not one of those people that's to myself and just quiet. I've never been like that, man. I've always been kind of loud. I'm out there, man. I do my thing, but I don't do it disrespectful. But when people rub me the wrong way, I rub people the wrong way. But I say what I say and I mean what I say.

As comics if you aren't rubbing people the wrong way, to me, you suck.

I don't want to come across the wrong way, which is hard when being funny or sarcastic at times, but I also want to make my posts more interesting.

You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.

I wrote 'Channel Orange' in two weeks. The end product wasn't always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.

I'd say the key thing is to remain true to what originally got you into music. When I wrote 'Hallelujah,' it ignited me to do music because of the love and joy that I got from writing that song. Down the road, you get all of these opinions from people; just remember what got you started in the first place.

I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.

I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock embedded in its flank was wonderful.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.

In the beginning, I was searching for myself in my music. My music was for me. I didn't have the mental room to be conscious of the listener; I wrote to save myself.

I grew up in a time where on things like 'The Red Skeleton Show' or even to a certain extent on 'The Carol Burnett Show,' people wrote in the breakouts or ad-libs. They were scripted to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.

We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode.

The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views.

I never wrote music for the mainstream.

I wrote the captions that built my brand.

I write all my own songs. Everything I did on 'The X Factor' was basically original, except for some of the live shows. Everything I did was original, and I wrote it from the heart.

I wrote a song on the record called 'Flawed Design' and it's basically looking at that, and it was just exploring how everybody obviously has flaws. I think to embrace those flaws - enjoy them, embrace them - and actually be a real person is something that a lot of people struggle with, myself included.

My approach to recording and all that is pretty organic. It just has to do with all the songs I wrote; go in and record them.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.