I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

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

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

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?

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

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.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

I always liked different things, rare things.

When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

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.

My life is my message.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

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.

We are all special cases.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

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

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

I’m different than most people. When I cross the finish line of a big race, I see that people are ecstatic, but I’m thinking about what I’m going to do tomorrow. It’s as if my journey is everlasting, and there is no finish line.

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.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose… I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

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.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

I never fall in love.

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

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

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

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

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

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

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.