If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

I thank God I’m in a position where I can pick and choose – there are some roles I don’t play.

If we weren’t all crazy, we’d just go insane.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

I already am a product.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything – diseases, spiders… and people getting tired of me.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

When you are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.

Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Laughter heals all wounds, and that’s one thing that everybody shares. No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

I kinda live where I find myself.

The wish for healing has always been half of health.

Be content to seem what you really are.

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

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

With mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

Everything’s intentional. It’s just filling in the dots.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

I’ve had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it’s not what I look for when I’m seeing someone.

Before you start a goal – let’s take care of our insecurities because they are going to surface when you put yourself in the crucible and you’re suffering.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things. It actually was great for a year or so, but then I lost all of my friends.

I am proud of having done what I’ve done. Very proud.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.