I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.

America has absorbed people from around the world, and there is an Indian in every part of the world. This characterizes both the societies. Indians and Americans have co-existed in their natural temperament.

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

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

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Like Frank Sinatra, I’m doing it my way.

My apartment is my stage, and my bedroom is my stage – they’re just not stages you’re allowed to see.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

You learn that there’s no right way to do it, no wrong way to do it. It’s just what you feel comfortable with, to trust that, and don’t let anybody box you in to a certain style of parenting or make you feel a certain way about what your kids do.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

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.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

I’m terrified of therapy because I don’t want it to mess with my creativity.

I don’t want followers.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

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.

Would you believe in what you believe in if you were the only one who believed it?

There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

My life is my argument.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

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.

Anything I’ve ever said, I certainly was feeling at the time.

I’ve never been one to sit back and go, ‚I’d better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don’t want to lose them.‘

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

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.

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

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

I have met 18 million youth, and each wants to be unique.

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

I think style is being so comfortable and confident in what you’re wearing. That’s what style is, ‚cause everybody’s got different style.

To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

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

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

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

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. You know, that’s not me.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

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 am just one human being.

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

When I’m inspired, I get excited because I can’t wait to see what I’ll come up with next.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.