I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

‚Border‘ was the first movie that I watched on the big screen. It always takes me back to my childhood.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

I really miss being able to blend in with people.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

What I think is fair to say is that, coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith – something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

Everyone calls me Bruno; they don’t ever call me Peter – that was just my government name.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

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.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man.

Jesus isn’t lettin‘ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily… When people say, you know, ‚Good teacher‘, ‚Prophet‘, ‚Really nice guy‘ … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me better.

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.

I’ve been around longer than most of my fans have been alive.

When I went back to my old high school, all these kids looking at me like I’m the real big homie, the same way I look at Jay Z, Nas, or Dr. Dre. You would’ve thought Michael Jackson walked through that joint off the excitement that they had.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

I’m happy that I have my family, and I’m happy that I had Virginia, where I grew up, to retreat to any time I felt overwhelmed. Whenever there were times when I felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me and I was floating in this crazy space, I would stop and go back to that neighborhood and realize nothing’s changed, really.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

There’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‚Everlong‘ is on it, or ‚Best of You‘ is on it, and it’s really special.

No, I’m not a French designer either. I’m from nowhere. I’m a European, old European is all I am.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

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.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

I don’t consider myself to be that credulous.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

I’ve always liked older ladies, ever since my mother would have B’nai B’rith at our house.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.