Quotes About Authenticity

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.

All men at heart, she thought—at bottom should I say?—are really queer. The way ballplayers pat one another on the fannies, running onto the field or coming out of the huddle. The Greek quarterback and the nervous center. Queer as clams. Though of course none would have the decency or honesty or nerve to admit it.

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

And most significant, these hordes of nonmotorized tourists, hungry for a taste of the difficult, the original, the real, do not consist solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don't know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children. The one thing they all have in common is the refusal to live always like sardines in a can—they are determined to get outside of their motorcars for at least a few weeks each year.

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.

Wearing a headband doesn't make you an Indian. Looking like a weed doesn't make you organic.

For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous

By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing -- which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring.

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot sticks to us … And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors. RAINER MARIA RILKE

Honest men have very little fun in life. It's a well-known fact.

Take it off, take it all off.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!

It's the real thing.

Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.

To be a fashionable woman is to know yourself, know what you represent, and know what works for you. To be "in fashion" could be a disaster on 90 percent of women. You are not a page out of Vogue.

If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

You don't make up for your sins in church, you do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

People are not perfect (except when they smile).

A nudist is simply a human being without artificial additives.

Meditation is to know oneself as one is. It is see our real face with out any mask.

You can't hide your true colors as you approach the autumn of your life.