I feel like when I try to fit in, it comes across as not genuine, and that is not good. I’d rather just do me and have people say, ‚Oh. That’s interesting,‘ than try to fit in.

If you consider the definition of authenticity, it’s saying something and actually doing it. I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

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.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

I will never say something I don’t agree with or believe in… even if the reward is massive!

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

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

If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.

I go to all these photo shoots, and each time I figure out something new about myself and what I want to wear.

You call yourself what you want to call yourself.

I’m on the autism spectrum. I don’t usually follow social coding and so therefore I go my own way.

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.

I still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

One thing about me is I try to be honest.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

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

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

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

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

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

I do have a few little tattoos, but they were mostly done to cover scars because I’m so fair.

I wanted to only create a great perfume, not any perfume that would sell, but a great artistic one that the fans would not feel cheated by.

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.

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

Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.

I’m not a star. I don’t feel I’m so great. So how can I make you feel great just because you’ve got my signature on a piece of paper?

I would impress upon your minds the fact that if you want to do a man justice, you should believe what a man says himself rather than what people say he says.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

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.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

I don’t do things for the response or for the controversy. I just live my life.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

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.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

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