Quotes About Authenticity

'Nothing Left to Lose' was an album that I wrote in my bedroom, and you don't know who is listening or who cares.

It's a dying art to play live anymore and just play raw. Who cares if you make a mistake? That's punk rock. Just go out and go for it and make some noise.

I am a very honest person, and I can only say there are moments in my life where I really did think I was being me in the sense of my morals and beliefs and the way I acted. But when I look back at certain things that I wore and my hair and make-up, I was like, 'Whoa! That wasn't me!' But I didn't know it back then.

I've been to the Met Ball and the Tonys, but Cannes is particularly huge. Every time at these big events, it's just - whoa. Because at the end of the day, I'm a guy from Devonshire who grew up on a farm who loves his dog.

When people see me in public, they're usually like, 'Whoa, you're a real person.' It's as if they're seeing Pinocchio or a cartoon character come to life.

I think, in the middle of the '90s, I made a couple of records where I tried to figure out what I thought the radio wanted from me. They weren't my best records by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't take me too long to figure out, 'Whoa, back up, dude. Just go back to following your heart, and it will all be OK.'

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

You're either humble or you're not. If you were a jerk before the fame, you just become a jerk with a bigger spotlight. Whoever you are really comes through.

I'm not very actorish. I don't play actor 24 hours a day. When the job is done, I go on to be myself, whoever that is.

You can be whoever you want to be when you are writing songs.

I haven't always been confident. I actually suffered with low self-esteem growing up. Eventually, I got to a point where I was just like, 'OK, this is taking too much energy.' After that, I started accepting myself for who I was, and I was like, whoever is not going to accept it, they weren't really meant to be in my life in that way.

My heroes were gospel blues players like Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, not whoever was number one.

Do what you're happy with and not what you think whoever else is going to tell you about you 'acting a color.' You don't act at all. You just do what you think is best.

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

I always pray when I write songs that my spirit guides, or whoever is with me, inspiring me, would let me speak the truth.

On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships.

After I transitioned, a lot of people said, 'I like you so much more now,' because before, I was unhappy. Making that change was a big part of becoming me. Whoever you are, as a gay man or a lesbian or a trans woman, embrace it. Turn it into an asset.

If your story is being told by someone who doesn't really know it, it's not going to come out accurate. A lot of it has to do with context. Whoever's behind the camera or pen or whatever.

The people who go get an LL album want to hear LL. They don't want to hear LL trying to sound like DMX or whoever else is out there. That's not what they want to hear from me, because if they want to hear that they can go get the real thing.

If you say, 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it,' well, then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record, I'm just going to cut the things that I like, and whoever likes it, likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.

My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean. My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn't want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment.

I always find the more you can draw on real life characters, people, situations, it works better. Certainly for designing a character, I prefer to draw on real people rather than other guys I've seen in movies, rather than 'here's my version of Clint Eastwood' or whoever.

Even though 'Kroll' was a crazy sketch show with big characters, one of the things I'm proud of about the show is that the characters were always kind of coming from an emotionally honest place for whoever I thought that character was.

The person is a resume, not what's on a piece of paper. Whoever gives advice about resumes in college should be dismissed. Titles don't matter. GPAs don't matter, nor does what school you go to.