My job is to engage, entertain, work out my life, tell a certain truth.

What I like to wear, I do myself. I don't know how that sounds, but it's the truth. My life is so mixed with my profession that I don't know where I begin or my work ends.

The truth is, working on single camera, show or film, you have no life. You work 60-80 hours a week. You're up before your kid gets up, and you're home when they go to sleep.

Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.

For each person, they live their life and their truth and how it works for them, and that's just kind of how it works for me. I'm not good at doing whatever the other way is - it wouldn't work for me.

Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work; get on with the business of one's life. That's the hope, anyway.

I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe.

The truth is that cleaning up socks and trying to get someone to really listen to you is marriage. It's less sweep you off your feet and more sweep the kitchen four times a day. Like everything good in life, it's 98% back-breaking work and 2% moments that make the work worthwhile.

By the time 1997 had rolled around, I had been in the music business for all my life, from the age of 15. I started recording professionally when I was 18. I had seen how record companies work, how the business works, and truth be told, I was pretty disgusted by everything by that time.

I worry about making work more important than what I know to be the truth. Throughout all areas of life, we're told how to look, how to act, what to speak, what to wear, what we should have and other people don't have, and we know none of that means anything. Yet these other messages never stop coming.

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