You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

When I’m nervous, I stutter, and I had to keep stopping and starting.

I don’t see myself as ever being like anybody else.

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

A lot of people have said I’d have probably done better in my career if I hadn’t looked so cheap and gaudy. But I dress to be comfortable for me, and you shouldn’t be blamed because you want to look pretty.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

Freedom lies in being bold.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

One of the most terrible feelings in the world is knowing that someone else doesn’t like you. Especially when you don’t know what you’ve done to deserve it.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

You call yourself what you want to call yourself.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

If you’re really satisfied with your position on something, you just say, ‚Hey;‘ you just very calmly present something.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

If you consider the definition of authenticity, it’s saying something and actually doing it. I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

I am criticised for not celebrating my goals enough. I am very happy from within, very calm. I just don’t celebrate. I celebrate inside.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It’s gossip.

The roaring thunder of the law and the fear of the terror of judgment are both used to bring us to Christ, but the final victory culminating in our salvation is won through God’s loving-kindness.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

The Paralympic Games is about transforming our perception of the world.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

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

When he speaks to you he speaks with an earnest vibe and an earnest energy.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.