Quotes About Authenticity

When I came out, it wasn't a big formal conversation like in the movies. I just started living as my true and authentic self and opened up my life to my parents - sharing who I was, and bringing a girlfriend when I came home for a visit. To my great surprise, my parents accepted me for who I was and have supported me since.

I do believe in God. But you won't find me visiting temples every now and then. I believe in self-realization. Peace of mind matters a lot to me. What's the point in doing something just for the sake of it? I'd rather do something I like doing as long as I'm being true to myself.

I think the problem with people, as they start to mature, they say, 'Rap is a young man's game,' and they keep trying to make young songs. But you don't know the slang - it changes every day, and you're just visiting. So you're trying to be something you're not, and the audience doesn't buy into that.

I spend more time being what I am: a writer, not the visiting celebrity.

I love to look good - I love to get glammed up - but it's not the most important thing in my world, and I'm not afraid to not be perfect. I can see where there is a lot of pressure 'cause we live in a very visual world, but I try to go a bit deeper than that. Things are just more important!

'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through.

I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

It's important that period films aren't seen as just a lovely visual exercise.

I don't really care what the visual is looking like. I've gotten away from - not shenanigans, but spectacle.

If you create a visual that actually captures the imagination, that's not real. It will look real, and that will spread at such lightning speed that by the time it's found out, it has already done its damage. It's a very, very scary time that we're living in. I say it's an age of absurdity.

I don't really trust musical artists that don't also do visual art.

I don't want to do transformations on people for the sake of a visual. I want to do it because it makes sense.

You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.

I don't like the lip-syncing-type videos. I like for people to listen to the words and see the visual.

My visual medium is my videos, and I've got to feel as though I can put my truth in that.

A new 'look' for any organization cannot be a papier-mache cover, tacked on with Scotch tape under the heading of 'beautification.' It has to be based on a probing examination of the company and the people who work for it. As a result, the eventual external visual design becomes the graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.

You know, there's so many great bands out there, visual bands, that we have to do something that makes us individual, and makes us stick out from everybody else, and something that is even bigger than just the music.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have. Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them.

Make sure you visualize what you really want, not what someone else wants for you.

As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.

I'm not eager at all to present my life out there for public consumption. I like to do one or two films a year and then do what is absolutely obligatory in terms of promoting them. My life outside of films is vital to me.

I'm not in the business of adapting things that are popular for the sake of just getting it on the screen. I think there has to be a vital reason.