I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

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

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

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

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

Sometimes a nickname is used instead of the real name. But a nickname may offend either the one named or the parents who gave the name.

In twenty years I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

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

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

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.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t ruled politics out.

Lady Gaga is my name. 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.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

I never wanted to be Marilyn – it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.

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.

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

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

I’m nobody, who are you?

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

You know, when you don’t go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly ‚in the know,‘ start whispering that you’re gay. If I were gay, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

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.‘

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.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

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

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

Throughout my life, I’ve always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

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

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I’m from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

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.

My affection for Taiwan… is witnessed by everyone. My wife is Taiwanese and I am a son-in-law of Taiwan. I am half Taiwanese.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

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.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

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.

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.

I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

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

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

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.