Quotes About Authenticity

Robert G. Schwartz

He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies.

Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things.

Popularity's overrated.

Yang bikin kelpek-klepek adalah lagak pujangga-teraniaya itu, omong kosong luka-batin, gaya genius-yang-tersiksa itu. …

but I've never been much for faking feelings or maintaining polite fictions to suit public celebrations.

He loved his aunt, who'd raised him for significant chunks of his childhood, but extended periods in her company made him feel stifled and suffocated. Her insistence on the smooth passing of counterfeit social coin from hand to hand, while uncomfortable truths were ignored and denied, wore him out.

Pretending you're OK when you aren't isn't strength.

When you're living a lie, nothing's more threatening than people who tell the truth…

Well, it's true, isn't it?" said Douthwaite, displaying unvarnished anger for the first time. "And I'm allowed to tell the truth about my own bloody life, aren't I?

The trouble with altering the facts to fit the picture is that it's a cumulative exercise. It starts as a game — a bit of a lark really. Then it gets serious, then complicated, then . . . then pleasure becomes pain because you find yourself and everyone else believing the charade — living the lie as if it were the truth.

I tell these stories because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of lying. I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over just because I was in a bad mood.

The truth shall make you free, but first it shall make you angry.

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

Don't imitate me; it's as boring as the two halves of a melon.

Some people live their entire life not knowing who they are, others live their life thinking they are something they are not. Only a luck few are blessed enough to find themselves in someone else.

Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.

Be game--take a chance--don't hide behind veils and veils of discretion... Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them. You are new evidence, fresh and young. Your work, the spirit of youth, you are the progress of human evolution. If age dulls you it will be time enough then to be ponderous and heavy--or quit. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be young, to continue growing--not to settle and accept.

A man must be master of himself and master of his word to achieve the full realization of himself as an artist.

Your only hope of satisfying others is in satisfying yourself. I speak of a great satisfaction, not a commercial satisfaction.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation. He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.

Pictures tell the story of actual impulse in the artist—or the lack of it.