All that self-expression has just created a generation of morons, hooked on an endless appetite for rubbish.

The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate… we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

I like to be creative.

No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.

There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Therapy? I don’t need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

I love being a woman and I was not one of these women who rose through professional life by wearing men’s clothes or looking masculine. I loved wearing bright colors and being who I am.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

You know, I just do whatever feels right to me! And so that’s what you’re gonna get!

The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

I believe the destiny of your generation – and your nation – is a rendezvous with excellence.

I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

I’m totally myself.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

I’m on the autism spectrum. I don’t usually follow social coding and so therefore I go my own way.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

I go to all these photo shoots, and each time I figure out something new about myself and what I want to wear.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.

My whole life is a theater piece.

If I’m in a bad mood, or if I’m uncomfortable, it’s probably what I’m wearing that’s making me feel that way.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

The whole slacker generation totally didn’t apply to us musically.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That’s why we’re such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, ‚Are people interested?‘ But I think our band has something and they know we don’t just put albums out. We do think about it.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.