Quotes About Authenticity

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

Every hundred year, mother make baby like Iron Sheik, Michael Jordan and the Jesus. Only one chance to prove you are the real in a lifetime.

I want to show people what I'm about - not just, 'Here's my celebrity partner this year that I'm going to showcase.'

The spring wakes us, nurtures us and revitalizes us. How often does your spring come? If you are a prisoner of the calendar, it comes once a year. If you are creating authentic power, it comes frequently, or very frequently.

Success will be when I can have a real swimming pool instead of the fifty-dollar one I buy at Kmart every year. But I don't want to get robbed of any authenticity to try and make money.

I certainly wear my heart on my sleeve, and I think that comes out in the characters that I play. There's a yearning, or something, that comes out of me that people relate to.

I've had the honor and the pleasure and gift of having known Elizabeth Taylor for a number of years. You know, you sit down with her, she slings hash, she sits there and cusses like a sailor, and she's hilarious.

It took me years to realize that 'normal' is actually super boring and that being myself was harder but infinitely more rewarding.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

I've learned since 'Drip or Drown' that no one should care what people think. I learned that, after years of comments, it really doesn't matter.

The thing that you think is imperfect about you is the thing that makes you who you are. It separates you from everybody else. I have a scar on my lip, and for years I hated it. But now its become my thing. It's like, without it, I'm not me. You can't be perfect, so enjoy your imperfections. I can't stress that enough.

Boys do cry, but I don't think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years.

For years I tried to put myself in a box, and it frustrated me, so I had to let go and let the universe take its course.

When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.

Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

I believe in tradition and innovation, authenticity and passion.

There's an academic tradition called the 'Last Lecture.' Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students? Well, for me, there's an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, for me, it wasn't hypothetical.

I tend to be one who just speaks from my soul, and so what comes out sometimes is rather harsh. In that sense, I'm very much a part of the tradition of a Frederick Douglass or a Malcolm X who used hyperbolic language at times to bring attention to the state of emergency.

I want to do performance that inspires people to be true to themselves and has tangible impact on the community. Not just because I want to be a role model - I just think it's the best way to honor the tradition of drag.

The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

Whatever your religious tradition is, if it's important to you and you don't feel comfortable talking about it, you end up coming across as insincere.

Any narrative, whether it's fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that's the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It's a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.

I am most attracted to characters and stories that I can relate to. The traditional formula of 'larger than life' I never found attractive.

The whole world feels that it knows Francis, not so much because he follows Francis of Assisi but because he is always himself. We have seen him pay his own hotel bill and heard that Francis called Buenos Aires for a pair of ordinary black shoes, like John XXIII, who preferred stout peasant shoes to the traditional papal footwear.