Old is authentic. Old is genuine. Old is valuable.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

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

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

I always wanted a great love affair: something that feels big and full, really honest, and enough. No moment should feel slight, false, or a little off. For me, it had to be everything.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

Oh, 1994, April 27. There won’t be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.

I would impress upon your minds the fact that if you want to do a man justice, you should believe what a man says himself rather than what people say he says.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television.

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.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

I’ve been lucky – all the ads I’ve got, I’ve got to be myself. I haven’t had to act too much or tried too hard to be someone I’m not. I think that’s why people sort of like them. Even the Fastrack ads I did with Genelia.

There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

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

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

‚9 to 5,‘ that little song, that little story, just won’t ever end. Just like ‚I Will Always Love You,‘ it just keeps comin‘ back, popping up its head in one way or another.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

I suppose my best attribute, if you want to call it that, is sincerity. I can sell sincerity because that’s the way I am.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Whenever something went wrong when I was young – if I had a pimple or if my hair broke – my mom would say, ‚Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.‘ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I’m used to not being taken seriously, but only the ‚light-hearted‘ Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the ‚deeper‘ Anne is too weak.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.

One thing about me is I try to be honest.

Friends accept you the way you are.

Whatever I am, it’s natural… I don’t have to pretend to be aggressive, don’t have to show the opposition that I am on the field. Being aggressive comes naturally to me, helps me perform.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

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.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

I love that I can talk to my fans through Twitter, to cut out the middle man. Because I’ve done interviews where my words have gotten twisted, so it’s nice to be able to have things coming straight from me.

We can’t just choose to tell some facts and not others because we don’t want to upset people. We have to tell it like it is.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

I’m totally myself.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I think that it’s okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn’t about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you.

I do say things that I think will shock people. But I don’t do things to shock people. I’m not trying to be the next Tupac, but I don’t know how long I’m going to be on this planet. So while I’m here, I might as well make the most of it.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

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

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

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

I was adored once too.

I still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.

I can tell you from experience that God’s help and presence in our lives is vital. He is the Author of all true success and everything that is good-without Him, we can do nothing of true value.