Quotes About Authenticity

I'm really white trash.

Some stuff I don't even put out. I'll just be home, happy, creating something for myself, and then ball it up and throw it in the trash. It's less about trying to prove something or get on somebody's list or make a fan happy or make a hater mad or convert a non-believer. That's not the case for me anymore.

There's the Draymond Green you see out on the floor. But that's not me. I mean, it is, but there's more. People see the fiery guy, the competitive guy, the trash talk and everything. But they don't see the love and compassion. They don't see the person. They don't see the real me, who values his friends and puts people first.

I'm enough of a southeast Texas boy - there's enough white trash in my blood that when somebody gives me money to make a record, I feel like I have to please them instead of myself.

Mixed martial arts - there's just been a lot of trash talking and things like that. People, I feel like, aren't really being true to themselves or being honest. I don't know, maybe that's what they feel they need to do to entertain things.

I talk the truth. I don't trash talk, I just talk the truth.

If I started talking trash right now, people would just tell me to shut up, 'That's not you, Stephen - be quiet!'

A lot of people came up to me and said you need to trash talk. That's not me.

Public posturing notwithstanding, when trash becomes a hit no filmmaker worth his salt takes it seriously.

It's not that I never do interviews or that I find them traumatic. It's just that I'm basically not that comfortable doing them.

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel.

The idea of 'raw' music, to me, is honesty: getting people to feel you with the least amount of production possible, the shortest distance traveled emotionally, sonically.

You were able to sing something they related to instantly, because it was part of what you felt. It was part of what you had already traveled through. It's part of the people you were associating with daily. It was all of that.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.

People don't realize it, but no one lives that rock and roll life 24-7. They think it's hundreds of bottles of champagne flowing and private jets and money. But there's a lot of time when you're traveling - time to think, time to be lonely. Sometimes it gets to you.

What's the point of being an Australian guy traveling through India if you are going to go to India to meet other Australians?

One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them.

Of course, there's no reason that Paris should have decent Mexican food. It's a silly expectation - there's a Mexican population in Paris, but they're not exactly traveling there from across the border. Paris also doesn't do Peruvian all that well, either.

I haven't done much traveling in my life at all - if you're seeing these places for the first time, so am I. So I decided not to pretend. I'm not this know-it-all host walking around claiming to know everything.

Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am travelling. It's not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.

At the end of the day, it's not the labels buying the music: it's the people out there, and you have to be behind the music and not anyone else. You're the one representing it, you're playing it for everyone; you're doing promotion and travelling around the world.

You do your best to tell your own story, in the most specific way, and then you hope that that travels well, when it's done with heart and honesty.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.