Herbert Marcuse Quotes

I always try to improve, to find new ways of expressing myself, to keep looking for truth and originality.

No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

A rapper is about being completely true to yourself. Being an actor is about changing who you are.

Until I came out, my acting was all about disguise, and thereafter it became about telling the truth.

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Truth is the number one element in whatever you do with music.

I'm all about authenticity.

Authenticity can't be replicated or faked. You're either real or you're not.

I like taking different elements - clothes, shoes, lighting - and creating a total transformation. But it's never about hiding: it's about drawing something out from deep inside of me that's really true. I'm always trying really hard to tell you the truth. That's what this is all about for me.

I think when you start changing things, you're not being yourself.

I think you can study too much. I've seen that happen. Young people get immersed in the work of other directors and end up imitating them rather than finding their own identity.

I don't pretend to be anybody else but me.

I want to be unique and original and truthful.

As I say, there's something that scares the hell out of me but it really makes me work hard in losing myself. I'm not really interested in me as an actor or being a personality player, or a Hollywood star. What's given to me is to become different people and to find the truth of that. That is really what I do.

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

In my show I announce, 'People say Lady Gaga is a lie, and they are right. I am a lie. And every day I kill to make it true.'

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word

Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.