I think the most attractive thing for me when I meet a guy is confidence and him being comfortable in his own skin. I like someone who doesn’t need approval or validation.
I think that the whole point of music is that there shouldn’t be rules. There is no right or wrong. And the fact that I may not like that piece of music and you may… The validation is in the fact that somebody gets something from it.
We all want recognition and validation to an extent for our art, but greatness as a trade for decency is a risky proposition. In my life, I try to leave the people I encounter with the feeling that they have been respected and treated with warmth and appreciation.
The fact that people still talk and obsess about ‘Twin Peaks’, more than twenty years after the fact, is a great validation for what we thought we had going at the time.
I spent a lot of time learning how to define myself internally rather than externally. I learned how to care less about external validation. I think that’s given me a renewed confidence in speaking out loud. I kind of don’t care what people think about me. I feel a lot more confident in saying what I believe.
For me, awards are a validation of my work.
I’ve realised you don’t gain validation from other people just because you have perfect skin or hair, it comes from the inside and I feel brighter and happier since I made peace with, and begun to accept, my spots.
I was 23, and all sorts of people were coming in and out and watching me, like Steve Allen and Bette Midler. David Brenner certainly took me under his wing. To drive home to my little dump in New Jersey often knowing that Steve Allen said, ‘You got it’ – that validation kept me going in a big, big way.
In society, we have to earn other things of import like trust, respect, money, education, careers, status and etc., so naturally, we find ourselves attempting to earn love, acceptance and validation along with that. Here’s the trip: we do it at the cost of other people and, more importantly, ourselves.
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