I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses – the wheelchair gives me away.

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.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

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.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

I’d like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

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

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

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal 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’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

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

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

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

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I’m a child of God first. Before I became a celebrity, I was baptized a Christian.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

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

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.

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

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

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

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

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

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

I just dress like… I’m an old black man. Sorry! Like I’m an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it’s still the ’50s.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

There are a lot of people who don’t know me and what I am all about.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

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 have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

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