The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.

My fat never made me less money.

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.

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

You are not a problem that needs solving.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

Being seventy is not a sin.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

I’m totally myself.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

I can’t tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I’ve got a good bead on myself.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

The hardest thing for – not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

I really have no interest in myself.

I just want to be myself.

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

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

People like to blame others. I think a person should just look at their own situation, look around them, find out what they wish to do, and seek and go and do that. And that’s it.

Certainly a woman should never disguise the fact that she is a woman. A woman’s body is very beautiful.

I spend a lot of time balancing between faith and disbelief.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.