My personal feelings are my personal feelings. I don’t want to express them with anyone except for a very few people. It doesn’t do any good. It really doesn’t.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

Fashion is here to help make people look very important. If they have good taste and choose what suits them, I give them options on how they can do that. It’s always sexy, and it’s always with the same result: making women look fantastic.

I don’t think you get successful to brag and throw what you have in the world’s face. That’s all private.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

I’m standing behind a wall of jokes. You don’t know about my personal life, my girlfriends, or what I do when I’m not on the road. There’s this guy, this comedian, and this is how he thinks, but people really don’t know anything about me.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

I don’t like people looking at someone else’s image.

Clothing & fashion are kind of my security blanket, almost.

I write all of my own speeches.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

My apartment is my stage, and my bedroom is my stage – they’re just not stages you’re allowed to see.

Everyone has their style and your style explains a lot about who you are – you feel me? I’ve had style since childhood, so I like to dress how I feel. But maybe I get carried away by some trends.

Like Frank Sinatra, I’m doing it my way.

When I came into this industry, I was never afraid to be myself.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

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 thought one should have the attitude of ‚What do you care what other people think!‘

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

I don’t want to be on the Internet.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

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

My whole life is a theater piece.

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn’t have to define you. It doesn’t have to limit you.

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

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

I’ve got nothing to hide.

On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.

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.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

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

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I’m a spokesman for myself. It just so happens that there’s a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I’m just as confused as most people. I don’t have the answers for anything.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they’re doing. People don’t look at me. They don’t even know I’m there.

I don’t want everybody to see exactly where I live, what my sofa or my fireplace looks like.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

Our cellar home had a kitchen and a combination bedroom and half bath, which meant we had a sink next to the bed. We had no refrigerator, no shower or tub, and no privacy. My parents shared the bedroom with my sister and me.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

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 just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

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

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!