If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

You call yourself what you want to call yourself.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

I wanted to tell the story of Luong Ung, who’s a dear friend of mine.

I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

No man was ever great by imitation.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.

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

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

I’ve never been shy or secretive with the fact that if you walk into my life, you may be walking onto a record.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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.

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

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.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

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

I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.

I only act from my heart.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

I don’t know that you can put a label on growth. I’m just me.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

What I’m denying is that I’m this cutthroat financier.

I want people to understand they have to live their own lives the way they want to and not just do what we do.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

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

I’ve lived a very colorful life, and I’ve said some things, But not once have I taken them back, and I’ve never apologized for them – and I won’t.

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

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

I’ve sat in sushi bars, really fine ones, and I know how hard this guy worked, how proud he is. I know you don’t need sauce. I know he doesn’t even want you to pour sauce. And I’ve seen customers come in and do that, and I’ve seen him, as stoic as he tries to remain, I’ve seen him die a little inside.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

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

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

I just want to be myself.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

You know, I just do whatever feels right to me! And so that’s what you’re gonna get!

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.