Quotes About Authenticity

We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.

you can't write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don't want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear.

I feel the blood rush to my face, fell that exquisite mixture of pain and pleasure that comes from being seen when you're vulnerable.

I am not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do. No mystique.

Some men," she would add in ominous seriousness, "are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captive within their houses.

And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am.

There is a difference between the facts of a person and the truth of him.

You will get to where you are going by remembering who you are…

I have no desire ... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love

Here's a real man!" I said. "It's been pretty transparent all along that other people's opinions about these things wouldn't be enough for you.

What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.

He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on display all night, a price tag stapled to every piece of clothing they've yanked onto him, binoculars and frog flippers included. He is the neutral, generic human form, the gray center who must always assume disguises — in order to be seen and, therefore, to feel himself.

Anyone who calls it "sexual intercourse" can't possibly be interested in actually doing it. You might as well announce you're ready for lunch by proclaiming, "I'd like to do some masticating and enzyme secreting.

Character is who you are when no one is looking.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

Everybody's serious but me.

The truth may be inconvenient, but it's better than anything else.

Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman.

You're not making a whole lot of sense." "I am in my head," I mutter. What does he need me to do here? Stand up on the table and yell, "Hello! Hot guy! I'm into you!

There might be bits and pieces of us that I don't like or that drive me up the wall, but at the end of the say, it's who we are. I'm going to make the best of what we have.