Quotes About Authenticity

What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Love shouldn't have to wear disguises.

I think I've learned that if you want to be successful, you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either.

Something in me had changed when Archie asked me if I wanted Sharon's cats. I thought then that if I didn't start saying what it was that I wanted, I shouldn't expect to get it. Archie got so off base about me because I let him be so off base about me. I was never clear.

When you didn't live in a strict corporate world, you didn't have to worry about fitting in and being politically correct all the time. You could afford the luxuries of self-expression. We took advantage of self-expression in spades.

If you are unwilling to write from the honest, though perhaps far from the final, point of view that represents your present state, you may come to your deathbed with your contribution to the world still unmade, and just as far from final conviction about the universe as you were at the age of twenty.

Thirdly, the advice is not to dash out and impress others by posing, pretending or downright lying about one's successfulness. The only one to impress, at least at first, is yourself, and that only to the extent of making for yourself a congenial working-atmosphere. The recommendation, once more, is simply this: Act as if it were impossible to fail.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made.

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

Don't call us saints, we don't want to be dismissed that easily.

I believe in doing the thing you feel is right. If it looks right, it is right.

Men like Jack didn't want to go out with a real woman - they wanted the idea they had of what a woman was. That was probably why I intrigued Jack: I wasn't cute and cuddly, and every time there'd been an opportunity to be a 'lady' I hadn't taken it - I'd been nothing like the idea he probably had of womanliness in his head. That presented a challenge. And if there was anything men like Jack craved more than a demure woman, it was a challenging woman to tame.

Are you always this honest?" "Almost never

am. This is the life I was meant to live simply because it's the one I have lived.

Maybe part of the problem of feeling like this life isn't my real life is that I have no connections, no real links to anyone.

When you can't be honest with people, you can't ever relax with them.

I'd spent so long trying to fit in,trying to be someone i wasn't,that i had no idea who i was any more.

I sometimes think people can see that I'm defective, that there's nothing there. Behind the job and clothes and makeup there's nothing to know. I sometimes think I'm this shell and I can't work out why people like me. And when I'm with strangers it reminds me of that. That I'm insubstantial.