Quotes About Authenticity

You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what all the shyness is all about and what everybody fears.

Who are the new people when you do meet them? They're the same old people in masks. There's nothing new about them at all. They're people.

Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.

Memoirs lie, but fiction tells the truth.

I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me.

devi fare solo questo, presentare una buona e coerente versione di te stesso, e nessuno verrà mai a farti domande.

I'm not in the business. 'Liking people' is often just another racket.

Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.

People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: 'the shifting sands'—ramál mutaharrika

Clothes are a masquerade anyway. When you go outside and see everyone in clothes, then you know for sure that nobody has a clue to why he was born and that, aware of it or not, people are perpetually performing in a dream.

Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went.

Actually, we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them - at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them

But the point was that I realized, on some level, that whatever a potentially 'lost soul' was, I was one -- and it wasn't cool or funny.

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

Never liked Kolanos. Was at a feast with him one time. Never heard him fart at all. Can't trust a man who doesn't fart at a feast.

I am a stranger. You do not need to lie to me or pretend. Only with friends do you need masks

I am a stranger. You do not need to lie to me or pretend. Only with friends do you need masks - Surely it is only with friends that one can be at peace. - It is easier with strangers, for they touch your life but for an instant. You will not disappoint them, for you owe them nothing; neither do they expect anything. Friends you can hurt, for they expect everything.

If the laughter is canned, so are you.

As the chapter on relationship building suggested (Chapter 5), we must find ways not only to be credible, but also to give the client the sense that we are credible. We must illustrate, not assert. Why

Don't tell lies, or even exaggerate. At all. Ever. 3.

The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.

We love you because you are you." "It is OK to like yourself." "Don't measure yourself by what others accomplish.

Whenever you are questioning a person's desire for something, consider what he does, not necessarily what he says.