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

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don’t live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

Some people reckoned that I looked healthier when I was bigger but I had terrible skin and no energy.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

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.‘

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

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

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

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.

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

I’d always tried to resist playing the supervirility thing. I liked showing the vulnerability of age.

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

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

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.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

When you’re just like everybody else, you’ve nothing to offer other than your conformity.

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.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

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 don’t think a lot of people know personally who I am.

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.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

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.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

The expression a woman wears on her face is far more important than the clothes she wears on her back.

People think I’m a celebrity. I’m not a celebrity.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

I always was a Christian… whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

I was 19 or 20 when The Beatles were at their peak, and I was coming up to the peak of my career, too. I was also the first footballer to have long hair, and that’s how I got my nickname ‚the Fifth Beatle.‘

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

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.

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

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

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

Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you’re wrinkled.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

My thing is this; if I’m sick enough to think it, then I’m sick enough to say it.

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 want to look sloppy, because then I feel sloppy.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

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.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

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

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

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.