Quotes About Authenticity

I'm sick of very white teeth and lots of gymnasium practice. I'm bored, you know, send in the next one. I wanted a real man that I could believe was my brother, my father, you know, my next-door neighbor - a real person.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.

That's where the Black Keys and Jack White have succeeded and I've failed: They've actually convinced college kids that they're listening to hip music - but it's just blues twisted a new way - while I'm playing for the college kid's parents.

In my real life, I wear a T-shirt, gray or white, and the same pair of jeans. Literally, the same pair of jeans every day.

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything.

Some girls like to say one thing and mean another. And me being who I am, I'm very straightforward. Everything is very black and white for me. I don't really like playing mind games.

I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

People didn't seem able to consider that maybe both were true. OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.

My relationship with aging is cozy. I'm not trying to play 29 and holding on with white knuckles, you know?

England is so black and white, so plain, like a burger with nothing on it. No salad, nothing. That's why it's so real.

Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.

I'm not one of those acts where it's, like, this mainstream person, where the average white kid at Harvard University is like, 'It's educational tonight. Let's all go out there and spend Dad's money.'

I'm thin and white and blond, but I'm not an airbrushed, perfect thing. I have stretch marks all over. I have cellulite; I have acne. To me, it feels like you can't really be what you can't see, and so if you don't see those things, then you don't feel like you're valid.

We did major work at the White House. But what people often don't understand is that when you do a historic restoration, you can't just do whatever you want. You work alongside the fine-arts commission and are obliged to create a replica of the past, as close as humanly possible. It's a historic institution, not a showhouse.

No doubt, the White House thinks the American people know Obama's story. But since the Inauguration, we've seen only the president's present: his perfect family, his Ivy League elegance, his effortless mastery of complex issues. We never see him sweat. And we forget that he ever had to struggle.

If I'm not comfortable, I'm not happy. When I go to the White House, I wear my jeans.

I do think that I'm not good at making pretty things. It doesn't come so naturally for me.

Truth will prevail.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

Just going out and seeing friends, not being cooped up in my house because I don't want to get my picture taken or anything like that - I've tried to let go of that stuff a bit, accept that it's going to happen to me, and not let it prevent me from doing anything I want to do, which I have in the past.

All politics to me - Indian or white - is an illusion preventing us from being authentic because we're communicating through something that isn't real to us.

There were no previews; we made the film we wanted to make.

Working with newbies has its own advantages as they're open to ideas and the audience can see the actresses as themselves, devoid of any pre-conceived image from their previous films.

Be willing to shed parts of your previous life. For example, in our 20s, we wear a mask; we pretend we know more than we do. We must be willing, as we get older, to shed cocktail party phoniness and admit, 'I am who I am.'