Selected authenticity quotes

1. There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

2. Acting is not pretending or lying. It's finding a side of yourself that's the character and ignoring your other sides. And there's a side of me that wonders what's wrong with being completely honest.

3. Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!

4. I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people's minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing.

5. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

6. The truth needs so little rehearsal.

7. The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

8. The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets.

9. I get more out of life just being myself, by just being a human being. Not by being a rock star, not by being whatever. Sometimes I act like a jerk, but I think people respect me for being myself. That's the ultimate thing about the Smashing Pumpkins.

10. The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.

11. Concepts vs. self-actualization. - Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, ACTUALIZE YOURSELF. The process of maturing does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.

12. There are lots of guys around the world that are lazy. They have big fat guts. They talk about chi power and things they can do, but don't believe it.

13. I'm probably one of the most dangerous men in the world if I want to be. But I never wanted to be anything but me.

14. The real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies.

15. It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.

16. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

17. Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heart From its present pathway part not! Being everything which now thou art, Be nothing which thou art not. So with the world thy gentle ways, Thy grace, thy more than beauty, Shall be an endless theme of praise, And love - a simple duty.

18. Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

19. I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell, I'm not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

20. I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

21. Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

22. The image is one thing and the human being is another...it's very hard to live up to an image.

23. Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.

24. Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.

25. My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

26. Sincerity is the key which will open the door through which you will see your separate parts, and you will see something quite new. You must go on trying to be sincere. Each day you put on a mask, and you must take it off little by little.

27. The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally.

28. Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

29. My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

30. When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.

31. I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

32. This is not a showman's job. I will not step out of character.

33. Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in. It's change you can Xerox.

34. I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

35. To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

36. It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.

37. The real me is a southern girl with her Levis on and an open heart. Wish I could save the world, like I was super girl.

38. The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.

39. The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on and individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you.

40. When you hear an instrumental song someone is singing over, you know right away it's wrong.

41. Man is only a disguise, a liar, a hypocrite, both to himself and to others. (377)

42. Positive vibrations man. That's what makes it work. That's reggae music. You can't look away because it's real. You listen to what I sing because I mean what I sing, there's no secret, no big deal. Just honesty, that's all. (1977)

43. One of the reasons the God-damn Jews hate me so much, is that all my games are real. Nothing is pre-arranged, its all over the board, and if I play great, I play great. If I plunder my Queen, I'm looking to mate him too. That's real, y'know. Not like the God-damn Russian Jew players. It's all staged.

44. Because of styles, people are separated. They are not united together because styles became laws. But the original founder of the style started out hypotheses, and now it has become the grospel truth. People that go into them became their product. It doesn't matter how you are, who you are, how you are structured, how you are built, how you are made. It doesn't matter. You just go in there and be that product. And that, to me is not life.

45. This statement expresses my feelings perfectly: 'In memory of a once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess.'

46. What you do if someone doesn't understand your song, is to keep on singing your song.

47. Buster Keaton... will be around forever, because it's unlikely that human beings will ever go out-of-date the way special effects do. Keaton running and clambering onto a moving Civil War train in The General is infinitely more exciting than Christian Slater jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding locomotive in Broken Arrow because what Keaton does is real, and the camera captures and preserves his feats for posterity. In Broken Arrow we never see Slater (or the stuntman, for that matter) leaping from the helicopter to the train. Instead there are several cuts, and we must suspend our disbelief and assume that the feat has been accomplished. Which means that it's no feat at all.

48. He had a cane, he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment.

49. I never give my work to somebody else and say, 'What do you think about that?' I just don't trust anybody. If I think it's funny, or if I think it's silly, I send it in anyway because I'm just trying to please myself. I never try to please a certain audience. I think that's disastrous. There's no way in the world you can anticipate what your reader is going to like or dislike.

50. 'RCA wanted a sweetheart kind of girl. Trust me, it's fights, always fights, just to be myself.'

51. 'I'd rather do what I love and get tomatoes thrown at me, than get up there, be fake, and get applause. I've got to be me'

52. Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce - an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence - ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included.

53. [Comments on crowd surfing] That is so stupid. It's not aggressive, it's not cathartic. It's like some sort of stupid kiddie ride. I hate that. Stage diving is still cool, though. That's where we come from growing up as hardcore kids. Most hardcore kids know how to stage dive and do it with style, but most kids today don't know what they're doing out there.

54. Anyone who steals a shoe is a poser.

55. We denounce this as impostors playing with fire.

56. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel : the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

57. Oh how the Vacancy Laughed at them rushing by. 'Turn again, flesh and brain, Only yourselves again! How far above the ape Differing in each shape, You with your regular Meaningless circles are!'

58. When Croft's 'Life of Dr. Young' was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, 'No, no,' said he, 'it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration.'

59. Better if he had said something natural like, 'Jesus, here we are.'

60. 'Sometimes people seem to think that my songs are more personal than somebody else's and I don't really think that's true. Y'know, I think my songs reveal whatever they reveal, they say certain things about who I am, whereas Will Smith singing 'Gettin' Jiggy With It' reveals certain things about who he is. Like for one thing that he doesn't mind singing a senseless song but I don't know, it's just--I don't know it's sort of like if no one is playing--if people who are by and large on the radio and television really don't give a shit what words they're singing then someone comes along who actually sings about things that matter to them, then everybody thinks that their lyrics are really personal. But it's just situational.'

61. 'Each singer (of the so-called folk variety), is recognized as much from its characteristic sound, as from what they actually sing or play, and they manipulate tone colour with a virtuousity that owes nothing to either the classical, or the Tin Pan Alley tradition; one thinks, for example, of the voice of Elvis Presley, an expressive vehicle, shifting from high to low tones, groaning, sluring, and producing breathless changes of rhythm; to many listeners, the voice may have seemed crude, but its folk inmediately resided in its crudeness'.

62. 'While he sings in a lower voice than ever -and what I liked about the early records was that beautifully vulnerable high voice-, he opened his Boston concert (1971) with 'That's Alright Mama' (1954), singing it with enough verve to scare the unsuspecting. It was his very first record, and although it doesn't sound quite the same as when he did it 17 years ago at the Sun studios in Memphis, I was moved by the fact that he was doing it at all. It was a tour de force of theatrics, professionalism, and, happily, music. (In fact), he sings so well, the audience hesitates to press him for more, his purpose being to please himself by pleasing them, never to please them by pleasing himself.'

63. America meant freedom and what is freedom? To Hoffer it is the capacity to feel like oneself. He felt like Eric Hoffer; sometimes like Eric Hoffer, working man. It could be said, I believe, that he is the first important American writer, working class born, who remained working class - in his habits, associations, environment. I cannot think of another. Therefore, he was a national resource. The only one of its kind in the nation's possession.

64. He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it's a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm - charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It's not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It's a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes.

65. Do I wanna do right, of course but do I really wanna feel I'm forced to answer you, hell no. I've acquired quite a taste for a well-made mistake, I wanna make a mistake.

66. Well, you ain't Fiona Apple. And if you ain't Fiona Apple, I don't give a rat's ass.

67. What you see is what you get.

68. Men and women meet now to be idle. Is it extraordinary that they do not know each other, and that, in their mutual ignorance, they form no surer friendships? Did they meet to do something together, then indeed they might form some real tie. But, as it is, they are not there, it is only a mask which is there - a mouth-piece of ready-made sentences about the 'topics of the day'; and then people rail against men for choosing a woman 'for her face' - why, what else do they see?

69. I can see the sham - but where's the rock?

70. I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant, because I don't believe there are many [great architects] - if any. For 500 years what we call architecture has been phony.

71. At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven.

72. We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile.

73. What I wanted to be on this album ['90 Millas'] is me, with everything I have experienced so far.

74. I like them in their natural state. They're lilke nuclear lemonades!

75. Just because we're celebrities, we shouldn't get dissed. What people might be complaining about is that they think a lot of these [other] celebrities don't write their own books. But I've written every word in this book -- both in English and in Spanish. I love music and I love children and I love animals, and it's a great combo of all those things.

76. I love Gloria Estefan, though -- she is cool. It's always just been about the music with her and they've been really good fun pop songs and really great ballads. And she's still going strong. She's quite classy and true to her Latin roots.

77. [The hardest thing about '90 Millas' was the concept of] combining the old and the new without losing the authenticity. The simple solution, of course, would have been to record covers. [But] emotionally it wouldn't have been the same We left Cuba as children: Gloria was 1, I was 14. So, there ia a part that does exist in nostalgia, but a the same [time] there is another part that is contemporary music that we've made all over the world.

78. My home is the only place I can really be me.

79. The wiser you get on the inside, the uglier you get on the outside. The world's great gurus have beautiful things to say but they generally look like shit.

80. I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I'll wait until November And sing a song of gray.

81. I am what I am I am my own special creation So come take a look Give me the hook or the ovation It's my world that I want to have a little pride in My world and it's not a place I have to hide in Life's not worth a damn till you can say Hey world I am what I am.

82. Hollywood can't believe that anyone does anything without an eye on the public, as if every actor wants to read about himself in the papers. It's depressing to think that such an artificial and unbalanced community exerts so much influence on our country.

83. Perhaps the absense of glamour contributed to my popularity. It may be that audiences felt comfortable with an actress who seemed cozy, approachable, unlike the flamboyant leading ladies I once knew in the theater.

84. One must talk about everything according to its nature, how it comes to be and how it grows. Men have talked about the world without paying attention to the world of their own minds, as if they were asleep or absent-minded.

85. I can't make her younger, taller, or change her gender. I can't do anything other than to tell you who she is.

86. I am watching Hillary Clinton in her victory speech in New Hampshire: they just threw a bunch of college kids behind her, and had her talk about student loans, and had her daughter come out for a long awkward hug: does anyone actually buy it? Surely young people are too media savvy to be fooled by this kind of shit. Do we live in a democracy so we can just keep electing the same families? Barack is the first candidate in my lifetime to strip some of this bullshit away, and I just hope we don't blow this chance. Man if we miss this opportunity we don't deserve it: how bad does it have to get?

87. There were other outlaws who missed the brass ring in the fifties. Lenny Bruce was one of them; he was never quite right for television. Bruce had tremendous potential until about 1961, when the people who had been getting such a kick out of him suddenly realized he was serious.

88. I've never set out to teach anyone anything. It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding 'What is today's message?' And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to 'thought for the day.'

89. Why not do what you really think, even if it's a mistake?

90. We live in a sad time where actors are politicians & politicians are actors.

91. We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't 'us' at all.

92. I always had an understanding and a connection and a good relationship with gay men and women. And I don't want to censor myself about the [censored] subject because I don't have a problem with gay or straight or any of that.'

93. For us, things like make-up are just for the stage. I'm not sitting here right now at the interview wearing lipstick or something, or eyeliner, or you know, or a bra for that matter.

94. I spent some time in prison. Just the normal stuff. Listen, I've had so much edge in my life, I don't need to contrive any. I'm not gonna front like Mr Angst.

95. People feel they have to cover up who they are to be loved. But success comes from being real.

96. Do you dare deny my potency my kindness or forgiveness?

97. I think I was just fed up with the image that had been created around me, which I sometimes consciously, most of the time unconsciously cooperated with. It just got too much for me to really stomach and so I put an end to it one glorious evening.

98. I don't believe the answer for us is to invoke the Lord's name 55 times in a speech. It looks political.

99. (after playing 'Sanctuary' by Vex) - That's Vex and on the back of the sleeve it says 'four individuals with no set ideals making music to provoke thought' - and the thought which most immediately comes to me is that it's almost time that we've had enough records like that.

100. That's Stump and that's another track in the forthcoming Peel Sessions EP series, if you see what I mean. It's not quite that but I'm not gonna try and reconstruct the sentence in front of you.