A Quote by Tama Janowitz

I'm writing what I want to write. But it's almost an act of rebellion on my part. Because as a person, I've always wanted to be very likeable, and I think that's a horrible thing, particularly for women. You're always like, "Oh, I hope I didn't hurt anyone's feelings. I hope they like me!" And that's just so stupid.
I was born in an odd spot and was a very sensitive kid. My feelings could get hurt so easily because I always wanted to be loved, I wanted to be touched, I wanted to touch somebody. I wanted everybody to love me, so I think I was louder than I should have been. I was just trying to get attention. I always felt like I was somebody special, maybe it's because I needed to be somebody special.
Hope. People want hope. We crave hope. We long for hope. Hope has been present since the very beginning. And almost in the worst situations of human history, you often find the greatest amount of hope. The very nature of the situation, the way stepped-on people created within them even more hope than when things were going fine. Hope has always been around.
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
I'd almost say hope isn't what it used to be. It's very difficult today to be a teacher. I speak to children. And tell them, look, no matter what, you must have hope. You must. When I invoke Camus, who said when there is no hope, you must invent hope. . .hope is something that is not what God gives us. It's like peace. It's a gift that one can give to one another. Only another person can push me to despair. And only another person can push me to hope. Its my choice.
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don't know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it's not. It's a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.
I think we all like to see ourselves as good dads, but there's also that fear, 'Oh, I don't want to be like my father,' or, 'I hope my kid doesn't turn out like me.' You know, I have those feelings too. So the key is optimism.
I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession. I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it. It's like, "Put on some makeup, make me look good. Okay, now I'm going to roll my shoulder." Part of me still feels like, "Wow, that's weird for a man to do."
Hope, to me, is wishing for something good to be true. I believe it is inherent in all of mankind to hope, not because we need to escape where we are, but because we have souls - and those souls were made for something greater than this world. I write about it so often because I think it compels us all. I want to make songs that people at any intellectual level can feel stirred by. Hope is the basest of human feelings to me, the feeling that all emotion springs from.
I think one thing my mother always instilled in me was a sense of individuality. Being an only child, I never thought I had to rely on anyone. I was never afraid to be alone and I was never afraid to be my own person. So when all my friends were like, "Let's smoke weed," I was like, "I'm not doing it." It wasn't because I was trying to be a rebel or because I didn't like it or I was anti-drugs. I just didn't do it because I didn't want to do it, and if I didn't want to do it, I wasn't doing it. That was it.
I've always loved to write. I've been writing a lot longer than I've been acting, and I hope to continue to do that and maybe do it a little bit more in terms of, like, writing movies that I could potentially act in.
It's not hard for me to be honest with my fans because that's what I set out to do from the beginning - I've based my entire career off of just trying to do that for them - but I always kind of forget that my real life friends can hear my music and they can watch my interviews if they want and that's when I get kind of like- "oh..." - I don't necessarily sit down and talk to my friends about all the things that I write my music about, because it's easier for me to write music than to sit and talk to my friends about it sometimes- it's almost like writing in a diary.
For me, because of WWE programming, it's easier for me to slip into someone that I'm not or someone that I always wanted to be and just haven't had the guts to. So this super, horrible mean person, I personally don't think it's who I am outside of the ring, but maybe it's someone I have always wanted to be and I just snapped.
I've always wanted to be a voice actor. Well I think at first I wanted to be a singer. Then in middle school I auditioned for a musical and I only really cared because I wanted to sing in it. I had to act as well as part of the audition and that was the first time I ever really acted, and I was like 'Oh hey, this is fun, I like doing this.'
I never had to look for confidence because I just wore what I wanted to wear. I would never wear anything to offend my husband or my mother, but outside of that, I always figured, I hope I'm not a rebel, and I hope everybody liked it. And if they didn't like it, it really was not going to disturb me because it was their problem, not mine.
I was always interested in acting, but in my high school sports was the cool thing to be part of, and I was still very into being cool. So I played a lot of basketball and football. But I always had that want to be in theater and to be a part of theater arts. But in my school, it was just a really nerdy thing to be a part of. Everyone in my school wore bowler hats - they were always on, always acting, and all so big. I was like, "I can't be that", even though I wanted to be.
I mean, my wife is always like - I don't write lyrics. So I couldn't, like, really technically write a song for anyone. I could write a very nice instrumental. So she always sort of gives me a hard time because it's just such a ridiculously impossible standard to live up to, that your step-dad wrote that song for your mom.
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