Quotes About Authenticity

You promote your films; it's part of your job. You do the magazine covers and stuff, and then I try to live a really normal life. I definitely don't try to make it into any more craziness than it is.

My life is not balanced and not everything is perfect all the time.

Life is too short and hell is too hot to just play church.

In order to represent life on the stage, we must rub elbows with life, live ourselves

So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection.

We tell the real truth of our life by the stories we repeatedly tell.

I would like to show that I have a heart, that I am a human being and I have feelings. And to be this kind of role model, not only for beauty pageants but also for life.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

I would always encourage people of any age not to be so quick to follow other people's truths but to search and follow your own moral code and live by your own integrity, and mostly just be brave.

I'm becoming more and more myself with time. I guess that's what grace is. The refinement of your soul through time.

Being idolized and being torn down felt oddly similar. They both made me feel alone. Friendship and trust should be earned, and when you're famous, people seem to want to give them to you whether you've earned them or not, and it felt dishonest to me. Fame was not real. It was all a projection—fame made me a blank canvas that people projected their love, lust, troubles, self-worth, and desire upon. Fame and power do not change us, they amplify us.

The truest treasure is a soul who believes in its own existence

Reality wins, and I'd rather see the truth than stay in love with a fantasy.

Engage in a loving archaeological dig back to yourself. Let all that is not yours within you fall away until only your real nature remains.

An artist's most valuable asset is individuality.

Life is about drawing and redrawing who we are and how we behave without shame or judgment.

For me, success was finding the courage to be true to myself, and holding on to a sense of humor along the way while refining my craft. Sean

I did not write love songs as a sixteen-year-old. I did not write about crushes or about mean girls. I wrote about my life—about the injustices and inequities and the search for answers and self-responsibility.

Be pretty, but not threateningly pretty. Be a go-getter but don't threaten anyone or be a bitch. Caught in this web of contradictions, we have to be everything for everyone and we lose the ability to explore who we really are.

True safety was not in having armor. It was in vulnerability.

At school, at home, in bars, I was an emotional contortionist, alternating between awkward self-aggrandizing and trying to win favor so as to fit in. When I wrote, I let myself be dead honest, flaws and all. But I was myself, I felt real. I went inside myself when a pen was in my hand and enjoyed that space in there.

No science fiction or fantasy is going to help me. I live in a too-real world.

What you don't see with your eyes, don't invent with your mouth.

Everyone wears a mask. I just chose to create my own.