Creativity Quote by Todd Rundgren

Rundgren’s line lands like a late-night studio confession: not grand philosophy, but the weary honesty of someone who’s spent decades watching people mythologize themselves in real time. He’s not defending lying as a moral choice so much as framing it as an emotional survival tool. “Endure existence” is the tell. The world, as experienced day to day, isn’t just hard; it’s often monotonous, disappointing, or bluntly unfair. Against that, the “lies we tell ourselves” read less like villainy and more like insulation.

The intent is to puncture the self-help fantasy that authenticity is always healing. Rundgren suggests the opposite: some truths are so unpleasant that pure honesty becomes a kind of cruelty, even when it’s self-directed. The subtext is about maintenance - the small stories that keep a person functional: I’m fine, this is temporary, they didn’t mean it, I’ll start tomorrow. He’s pointing at the quiet bargains we make with reality to get through work, relationships, aging, ambition, regret.

Context matters because Rundgren comes from a pop landscape built on curated feeling. Rock stardom runs on persona, reinvention, the stage self that’s truer than truth because it’s engineered to be bearable and coherent. His phrasing (“a certain amount”) is key: he’s arguing for dosage, not delusion. Total honesty is unbearable; total dishonesty is collapse. The everyday ethic he’s sketching is pragmatic: we don’t just live by facts, we live by fictions calibrated to keep us moving.