I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

I got teased my entire school life. What they were picking on I don’t even understand.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

It’s true my father abused me and didn’t love and protect me the way he should have, and at times it seemed no one would ever help me and it would never end. But God always had a plan for my life, and He has redeemed me.

I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

Your emotions are very unstable and should never be the foundation for direction in your life.

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.

I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

I don’t think I get that upset over things.

I used to have a real problem with self-pity. Every time the devil would throw a pity party, I would attend.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

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.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

I’ve always believed in God. I also think that’s the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

I’m a free spirit.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

To add value to others, one must first value others.

I don’t think any country is perfect. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don’t like. I think that’s part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

Sometimes, I’m very embarrassed.

Without being the most confident person in the world, I think I am the right person for Liverpool.

A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.

I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them – they are individual and stylish.

I have no human feelings.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I felt like, for so many years – and I still even feel it – as a girl, you can’t really expect to go on stage and dress like a boy and jump around and scream with the audience and mosh and stuff, and every time that happens, I feel really proud.