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

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

I feel like when I try to fit in, it comes across as not genuine, and that is not good. I’d rather just do me and have people say, ‚Oh. That’s interesting,‘ than try to fit in.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

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 don’t believe in endorsing a product that you don’t want to endorse.

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

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.

Live truth instead of professing it.

The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

I had a lot of resistance, and not just to fame. I was always conscious of not changing.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

I’ve definitely seen bands before they made money kind of change their thing on the next tour, and I prefer it when it’s a little more raw.

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

I do believe in God. But you won’t find me visiting temples every now and then. I believe in self-realization. Peace of mind matters a lot to me. What’s the point in doing something just for the sake of it? I’d rather do something I like doing as long as I’m being true to myself.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

The worst crime is faking it.

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.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

I’m not going to say I’m cool, because I don’t really feel that. I just don’t care at all, and I guess that’s what people think is cool.

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything.

I’m not really concerned with portraying this tough warrior – I mean, that’s part of my job and I take that very seriously. But I don’t have anything to hide, and I’m not concerned with what people think.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

They’re right to think that about me, because I’m the person most likely to sleep with my female fans, I genuinely love other women. And I think they know that.

Who I am on stage is very, very different to who I am in real life.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

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.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

All I can do is try to create my own brand and have people appreciate me for that.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.