I never have really become accustomed to the ‚John.‘ Nobody ever really calls me John… I’ve always been Duke or Marion or John Wayne. It’s a name that goes well together, and it’s like one word – John Wayne.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

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

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

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.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

I just dress like… I’m an old black man. Sorry! Like I’m an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it’s still the ’50s.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

No, I’m not a French designer either. I’m from nowhere. I’m a European, old European is all I am.

Proud 2 Pay – that’s something that distinguishes me, that’s something that defines me, and we’re going to keep that going.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

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.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

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.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side, not the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

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.

I feel Anglo-American.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

There’s Madeleine, and then there’s ‚Madeleine Albright‘. And I sometimes kind of think, who is this person? Once you become ‚Madeleine Albright‘ it doesn’t go away.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

I am not The Rock. I am Dwayne Johnson.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

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

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

I’m nobody, who are you?

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

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.‘

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

I don’t really like to call myself a brand, and I don’t like to think of myself as a brand. I’m a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that’s not my focus.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

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

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.