Quotes About Authenticity

Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are

Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.

Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.

Waikïkï is less Hawaiian than it is a bad mix of Las Vegas and Cancun.

You can get CUT UP, DRESSED UP, MADE UP, DRUGGED UP, but at the end of the day you are the MAN or WOMAN God made you.

I don't care about the rules of grammar so long as my characters' words sound true to life and bite heavily.

If you're a writer, you're not a short order cook. Forget what people want. Write what you want to write, be true to yourself

When you write, bleed copiously from an open wound. Write from the depths of your heart.

If your fiction is good and true, your novel's ending will discover itself.

Don't write for the market or for others. Write what you know, love and above all, write what you would love to read.

A reader is your partner, a friend, not someone who needs to be impressed. Keep the writing honest, make it come from the heart.

If your writing is brutally honest, comes from the heart, beware, it will take its emotional toll. But, it's worth it.

Write fearlessly, from the heart; pour your guts out and don't give a damn about what anyone thinks.

I sometimes surprise myself when one of my characters says something I would never say.

Dealing with truth is tough. In a sense, we're all unreliable narrators.

You know you've been writing from the heart when, in the midst of a story, you ask, 'What would my mother think of this?

A writer's downfall is chasing the marketplace. Doing that, you only see it's rear end. Write from the heart, not for the market.

My writing is how I maintain.

If I serve you in hopes of Paradise, deny me Paradise. If I serve thee in fear of hell, condemn me to hell. But if I love thee for love of thyself, then grant me thyself.

There's a famous quote which goes something like, 'You are what you are, having secretly become what you wanted to be'. Maybe there's some truth to that. We like to think that society shapes us, but I don't think that that's the way it happens. Select, 1991

The world does not need a 'gay Elvis', for the original, with his black leather suit, pomaded pompadour, come-fuck-me eyes and radiant narcissism, was quite queer enough

But the truth is, we have done more damage to the world's impression of Jesus by feigning inaccurate perfection than we could ever cause by allowing those who don't follow Christ to see us wrestling our sins and flaws to the ground.

be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment," said Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment