We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I have the space and liberty to create.

I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‚What a waste of energy.‘ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.

Fear is exciting for me.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

You’re not going to scare me into being somebody I don’t want to be.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

In order to heal others, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal ourselves, we need to know how to deal with ourselves.

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.

I don’t have to show anything to anyone. There is nothing to prove.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

I do have a few little tattoos, but they were mostly done to cover scars because I’m so fair.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Yeah, I’m an open book.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I’m just more sexually attracted to women. But I’m really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

One of my proudest moments is I didn’t sell my soul for the sake of popularity.

There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.