I like touring extensively because I think the more hours you spend onstage, the more you know who you are onstage.

What I like about Elvis is the same thing I like about James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince. These guys, back in the day, there was no smoke and mirrors. It was just raw talent. They would step out onstage and command an audience. Talk about awesome.

I’m a really artistic person, and so, with the live stuff, there’s a lot that I think is really cool. Beyonce and Rihanna have all these dancers. So with the live costumes and video costumes, I’d really like to have my vision. The way that I want people to dress is very specific. I love fashion.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

It’s hard for anybody who’s been with me not to feel starved for affection when I’m making love to my ideas. Maybe it’s not meant for me to settle down and be married.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

I am two with nature.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

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

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

I refuse to accept other people’s ideas of happiness for me. As if there’s a ‚one size fits all‘ standard for happiness.

In order to heal others, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal ourselves, we need to know how to deal with ourselves.

It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

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?

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

In the flush of love’s light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it’s an incomparable experience.

I knew that I was ‚interesting‘ at 18 because I was aware that I could get away with doing things on stage.

I always said that I wouldn’t use a teleprompter, and if I start to sing real flat, I’ll hang it up.

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I don’t know if I’m selfless – I still want to make a great record. I want to make a hit record. I want to tour; that’s not completely selfless. But the truth is I’m not interested in people coming to my show for me as much as I am for them coming to my show for themselves. That’s always been how I am.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

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.

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is, to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.