Authenticity

Do not waste it trying to become someone you're not. Use it to become who you are already.

Don't confuse success with excellence. The poet Robert Penn Warren once told me that 'careerism is death.'

Live your own life, not the life that others expect of you. The only life worth living is one that is truly your own.

Don't believe them when they tell you how bad you are and how terrible your ideas are, but also, don't believe them when they start telling you how wonderful you are and how great your ideas are. Just believe in yourself and believe in your work and you'll do just fine.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.

The story of your lives will be the story of your struggle to be true to the ideas you believe in.

Self-confidence — quiet self-confidence — is the key to winning. A quiet, deep-seated belief in yourself and what you stand for. Cockiness has nothing to do with confidence.

Your personal integrity is always in your own hands and can never be taken from you. Only you can give it away.

There is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory.

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth, without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you.