Quotes About Authenticity

I always laugh to myself when I listen to some really big A-list star saying that they are just a normal person.

I'm a normal person. You say something about me, I'm going to say something back, funny or not. I'm just going to be me. It's nothing against them. I'm just doing what you do to me.

I like the songs that are fun, that aren't gonna change the world - I've some of those - but even something like, 'You Should Be Here,' that was my chance to say, 'Look, this is me, too. I'm just a normal person.'

I'm just a normal person, believe me.

I just want to be a normal person.

I'm one of those artists who doesn't really believe in fame. You can be a normal person these days, you don't need celebrity appeal.

I'm a normal person, but people see me as this person who's not really real, almost like I don't have feelings. They think they can treat me any way they want to.

I let everybody see that I'm a happy, normal person.

I don't want to be stuck up. I'm just a normal person. My friends think of me as a normal friend, and I like that.

Normality is death.

I sort of felt like being young was normally written about as being very fun and light-hearted. And I think that's true, but I don't feel like there's a lot of songs about how hard it is when you don't really know who you are or what you want, and you feel like you have to apologize for simply just existing.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

Playing Mo-yeon was satisfying because I could be irritable. I normally can't be like that in public because of my image.

I normally don't concern myself with, 'Will audiences like me or like my character?'

You normally either get bitten by a character and decide that is the way to play it, and then that begins to inform everything you do, or you decide, 'I don't need to use much character in this - I have basically got to be me'.

When I started to write music that was completely divorced from any sort of idea of commercial success, the real me started to come out. Normally, a musician in a session for a pop record would have to discard a lot of ideas because they won't fit, because they're not commercial.

Normally I don't have a scrap of makeup on me when I'm on the radio.

I'm not always interested in Hollywood norms and boy-next-door kind of characters.

I don't follow norms in my life. They don't make sense to me. I do whatever I feel or what makes me happy and feels right.

Too often athletes think there's these norms that I have to fit into and there are people that I have to please.

The problem is, authentic hip-hop culture is street culture. And so you've got middle-class blacks really emulating the norms of the South Bronx, which is not really in their best interests.

To live a life that is wrong for you is a form of dying. There are people who have lives that look perfect. They try to be happy, they believe they should be happy, they are trying to like it, but if it's off course from their north star, they aren't satisfied.

No matter where you put me, I don't care if it is North Carolina, Florida, California, New York City; I'm going to be who I am.

I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.