Quotes About Authenticity

In the end, it was one or the other—be myself, or please my father. I chose me. And loyalty to my real friends.

What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

How do I know you're not crazy? she asks. How do I know you're not the craziest dude I've ever met? You'll have to test me out. You have my info, she says. I'll think about it. Rain, I say. That's not your real name. Does it matter? Well, it makes me wonder what else isn't real. That's because you're a writer, she says. That's because you make things up for a living. And? And-- she shrugs--I've noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that.

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.

Akthent on thee latht thyllable.

Is that your real name? Does it really matter? It makes me wonder what else is not real.

there's no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor's dream.

most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense, we've all become actors.

What is this bullshit—it is what it is?

What is the most significant conversation you have every day?" People would respond piously, "Your conversation with God, of course." "No," Lewis would reply. "It's the conversation you have with yourself before you speak to God, because in that conversation with yourself, you decide whether you are going to be honest and authentic with God, or whether you are going to meet God with a false face, a mask, an act, a pretense.

The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way?

Yes, you can choose to say you believe something. But whether you actually and authentically do believe it is less choosable than it seems.

knowing that people may not want to hear what I really feel needs to be written

he encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don't want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life's difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers.

Humans are different in private than in the presence of others. While the private persona merges into the social persona in varying degrees, the union is never complete. Something is always held back.

We have to find a place that is ours. The doctors keep trying to make us fit into this world, but they're wrong. We need a world that fits us.

Most of us think we can hide our weaknesses from the world, and sometimes, we're right. But only if we're very very strong.

it isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed.

What matters, finally, isn't finding the kind of person you think you should love. What matters is finding someone you feel more alive with.

Truthfulness is the main element of character.

Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily; even if you had no title or position.

Well, most of the time I do what feels right. But I admit there are times when I give in to my ego. Sometimes the rationalizations are so good that it's easy to sidestep what's right. But eventually you do always realize if you haven't been true to yourself. There's that tiny niggling but persistent voice at the back of your head that is not very easy to ignore for long.