The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don’t like it, actually.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

I’m not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.

When I was little, I used to adore gold. It was something special.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. ‚Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.‘ First of all, my girl is black: she’s Jamaican.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

I want everybody to understand that I am an American Negro first before I am a member of any political party.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

I’d like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

I’m a child of God first. Before I became a celebrity, I was baptized a Christian.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

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.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

I was born in Earl K. Long Hospital. I was born Feb. 5th, 1986. I have a lot of family members. My grandmother had five girls, and all of them had children. It was always a house full. A lot of cousins. A lot of family members.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Girdles and wire stays should have never been invented. No man wants to hug a padded bird cage.

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

It’s a very strange thing being recognized or looked upon as someone special.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

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

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

Me and my dad are friends. We’re cool. I’ll never be disappointed again, because I don’t expect anything anymore from him. I just let him exist, and that’s how we get along.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

I saw a picture of myself when I came out of the hospital. I didn’t recognize myself.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

I still consider myself a little, fat kid from Hawaii.

As a kid, even I knew everything about my favourite cricketers. I used to know everything possible. Now I see kids knowing about me. It feels good.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

Only Americans can hurt America.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

People think I’m a celebrity. I’m not a celebrity.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

Childhood was very nice. The only thing wrong was that I was so introverted, everything became a big deal… ‚Oh, no, here comes the bus. Where am I gonna sit on the bus?‘

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.