Quotes About Authenticity

My father always told me to be myself and say what you think is the right thing; sometimes you pay the consequences, but it means tomorrow will be a happy day for you.

I'd like to not have to worry about image, about doing the right thing all the time. Not that I want to be a criminal or anything. I'd like to be able to do something wrong and not feel the whole world will know.

That's what I want to do with my life. Be a good person when all the lights are off. When everybody doesn't need to see you, shine and know that you know you did the right thing at the end of the day.

My favorite line to Phil is, 'You can say the right thing on TV, but why can't you do it in real life?'

The secret of success is sincerity.

The secret of success in every field is redefining what success means to you. It can't be your parent's definition, the media's definition, or your neighbor's definition. Otherwise, success will never satisfy you.

I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on 'The Simpsons' is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem.

The early seasons of 'The Simpsons' had a great deal of heart. That's what I'm trying to pull from, the kind of stuff that goes straight to kids' hearts. When they're watching, they don't necessarily know why they love something.

The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time. 'The Who Sell Out' is one of the greatest art-project albums of all time.

In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.

Live theater to me is much more free than the movies or television.

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

I can't stand interpretation. I think it's one of the great scourges of the theater. I just think, 'Don't get in the way of the play.'

I started off doing theater as a kid, and I always played a character. I hid behind the script and was told where to go. But to actually perform as yourself is very difficult. I didn't used to enjoy it, but now I do.

'Sleepy Hollow' was really the first thing I'd done that gave me the opportunity in the modern age to build an authentic relationship with an audience that was a lot more like what happens in theater.

Theater to me is acting but it's more real on film.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

When I made a breakthrough as an actor, people started to say, 'Who's that bloke with the funny name?' They advised me to change it, saying it would never be put up in lights outside theaters because they couldn't afford the electricity. But I would never contemplate changing it. It's who I am.

To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.

I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.

The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.

I think that one of the beautiful things about theatre - and a place like 'Powerhouse' - is that who you are is informing your work. There's actually no separation from that.

I feel that film, as opposed to theatre, is about capturing that one, real moment.