I’m not trying to be sexy. It’s just my way of expressing myself when I move around.

Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

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.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

Whatever position I occupied, it was the result of colleagues – of my comrades in the movement – who had decided in their wisdom to use me for the purpose of focusing the attention of the country and the international community on me.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

My style advice to other girls is to be experimental but always have a ‚home base‘ and stick with your comfort style.

It’s important for me to let my fans know I really don’t care. I’m confident.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

I’m not afraid to look bad on the screen.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.

I’m never nervous.

I don’t want to look sloppy, because then I feel sloppy.

I think there is a little magic in the fact that I’m so totally real but look so artificial at the same time.

When I say something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.

Fashion is one thing, but style is another.

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don’t live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.

If I’m in a bad mood, or if I’m uncomfortable, it’s probably what I’m wearing that’s making me feel that way.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Success is the child of audacity.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

Your teammates give you the confidence. They give me the confidence all year, all postseason.

Everybody has a creative potential and from the moment you can express this creative potential, you can start changing the world.

When I’m out on the football field, I have so much confidence in what I’m doing.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I’m confidently cocky, you might say.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

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

I don’t believe in doing things to manufacture my body to appeal to what I think people might like.

A lot of people have said I’d have probably done better in my career if I hadn’t looked so cheap and gaudy. But I dress to be comfortable for me, and you shouldn’t be blamed because you want to look pretty.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it.

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.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

Without being the most confident person in the world, I think I am the right person for Liverpool.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.