Quotes About Authenticity

He thought he was playing her. Seducing her. That was the play, but it felt all too real, and he'd never had real.

You are fierce and passionate and fiery and I love all those things about you. In a fight, I can count on you to keep your head and get the job done, even if you're afraid. There's no need to be anything other than who you are, who you're meant to be.

I need you, malen'koye plamya, just to breathe, to live . I've never said that to another human being, but it's the truth. Not for Shturm, but for me.

It was strange, that feeling of freedom, as if by tying her, he released her spirit--beaten down, so encased in the beliefs of others, what was right, what was wrong, what she was-- so that she could just be. Simply be.

She didn't want the mask he wore around others. She wanted the true intamacy he had given her, the real Vittorio, the real man. He had offered her that man and she'd been so afraid she'd rejected him.

He wanted Shylah to see past his physical appearance to 'him'. He needed her to care who he was.

You loved a person for who they were, not what you wanted them to become.

I've often wondered why there should be some people who want everything about me to be false or masculine, or what my critics would say if I suddenly appeared with close-cropped hair, no makeup and in men's clothing. I strongly suspect that, too, would leave them unsatisfied.

Nature made a mistake which I have had corrected and I am your daughter.

I have never been such a real person as I am today.

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

the only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.

I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy

I would hate to think of myself as normal. What's the point of working your whole life if you end up having to do what other people want?

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.

New forms of the artistic register are one of the infallible signs of an authentic moment.

Very often, people embarking on such guesswork make the vulgar assumption that the lower the motives, the more likely they are to be authentic.

There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is better than no sincerity at all.

This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the "infinite capacity for taking pains" that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

Only servility requires the realm of illusion.

Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.