I don’t believe in endorsing a product that you don’t want to endorse.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

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.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

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

There’s no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don’t try to adapt it, make it commercial.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

Selling out is doing something you don’t really want to do for money. That’s what selling out is.

It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

When the whole world has their eyes on you, if you say something that doesn’t truly come from your spirit and your soul, or if you wear something that doesn’t come from your spirit and your soul, it’s an injustice to your position. And so, I’m really myself every single day and I do it because I know my fans would want me to.

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

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

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner – I don’t choose to insulate myself in engaging in real life. Hence, the public kind of almost knows me as much through my real life that they see through the rag mags.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people’s minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Real life is the life that’s in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you’re in relationship with.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.

Whether I’m wearing lots of makeup or no makeup, I’m always the same person inside.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I’ve always been – you know, my personality is motivating and encouraging. And so I’m just being who God made me to be.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

I can’t pretend that I’m brave and that I can beat the whole world.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

I just want to be myself.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

The worst crime is faking it.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

Friends accept you the way you are.

I’ve always done whatever I want and always been exactly who I am.

I’m tough when I have to be, tender when I should be. When you find a really tough guy, he’s not a predator. He doesn’t have to prove himself. Guys who have to pretend to be tough, they ain’t. I’m tough.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

I know a lot of artists say this, but it’s hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There’s no tricks.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That’s an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can’t cheat real connection. It’s built up slowly. It’s about trust and time.

The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.