Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

Fear is exciting for me.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.

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

Every time you think the problem is ‚out there,‘ that very thought is the problem.

I’m not the most patient of people.

Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

I don’t make people bend over backwards, and I don’t like that in people. I am definitely no diva.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

I used to feel unsafe right in the moment of an accomplishment – I felt the ground fall from under my feet because this could be the end. And even now, while everyone is celebrating, I’m on to the next thing. I don’t want to get lost in this big cushion of success.

I resigned from the Marine Corps and flying in 1974, even though I loved them both. I quit because I no longer wanted to fight for peace. Instead, I believe we can build a more sustainable peace by working for prosperity.

Coaching wouldn’t be for me. No, certainly not.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Fear is real, but so is love.

How you played in yesterday’s game is all that counts.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

The more people I reach, the more people there are that have opinions about me. Not everyone loves me, but I have to be okay no matter what they think about me.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I think I have always had a little humor.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

My life is my message.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

A person who is truly authentic doesn’t need to play a role in life, we think, but can simply be him – or herself.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

I always try to be smart. I try to treat all the money I’m making like it’s the last time I’m going to make it.

I don’t think about that. I wasn’t a kid growing up saying one day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn’t on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

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

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

I have always thought I was the best ever player.

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Reactive people… are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.