Quotes About Authenticity

Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics—cappuccino enemas, say. This is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simply spiritualizing your hysteria. There are millions of people already doing this at churches and New Age festivals across the land.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But

Writing: shitty first drafts. Butt in chair. Just do it. You own everything that happened to you. You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart–your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born

The old adage is that intimacy means "Into me I see"—deeply, with a flashlight—and believe me, we're not trying to avoid seeing the lovely and selfless aspects of ourselves. It's not even the unlikable qualities—narcissism, fraudulence, envy. It's the really disgusting, uncooked-egg parts of us—wanting people to fail, using people, holding on to resentments, our sense of entitlement.

You don't get to sit next to your readers and explain little things you left out, or fill in details that would have made the action more interesting or believable. The material has got to work on its own, and the dream must be vivid and continuous.

You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath.

Love can bring people out of isolation, get them to take off the Halloween masks they wear, breathing through the slits.

This menagerie - it was part of my being repented - to show up places where I might have been afraid, like the zoo or a marriage.

Rilke wrote: "I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

little girls baked and learned to dust furniture, and this pleased everyone—briefly. When I was needy, shy, worried, deeply sensitive, too skinny or, later, overweight—in other words, most me—not so much.

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see that bleak, unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words -- not just any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

we won't love you if you're perfect

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

Ridicule was a better defense than truth.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old—I hardly see them; I don't worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.

I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

I don't worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride.

The truth can be very sharp. But it makes a cleaner wound than lies. It will not fester

In that moment there was no pretense between them, no lingering vestige of reserve or attempt to escape, no denial. It was final and complete.

Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are.

the honest friendship where there was no barrier between men and women, where speech was not forever dictated by social ritual rather than true thoughts and feelings, where people worked side by side for a desperate common cause and only courage and skill mattered.

Love also means the freedom to follow your own conscience. If you can't be true to yourself, you don't have much left to give anyone else.