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

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

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

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.

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

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 have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

I don’t want to look sloppy, because then I feel sloppy.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

Everyone calls me Bruno; they don’t ever call me Peter – that was just my government name.

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

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

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.

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

I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.

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

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

I think I’ve committed the one really bad English crime, which is I’ve risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I’m claiming that I’m an artist of some kind.

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

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

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.

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

I am not handsome or sexy. Of course, it’s not like I am hopeless.

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.

People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

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.

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’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

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

What I think is fair to say is that, coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith – something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself – for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

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

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

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

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

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

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

I never wanted to perform and never proclaimed myself to be a performer.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

I kept a diary right after I was born. Day 1: Tired from the move. Day 2: Everyone thinks I’m an idiot.

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

Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I was performing in New York and my friends started to call me Gaga, they said I was very theatrical and they said, ‚You’re Gaga‘.

I’m not talent. Not considered ‚talent‘ by Lifetime. I’d like to say I’m their savior, but that would be cocky.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

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.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

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.