Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

Even with my divorce and with everything, I don’t need money.

I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.

I realize I don’t do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye, and you will be drawn toward it.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I got my own back.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together. And the floodgates of goodness have opened upon me – spiritually and financially.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.

We work to become, not to acquire.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

I don’t have the best track record with quotes.

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The essential lesson I’ve learned in life is to just be yourself. Treasure the magnificent being that you are and recognize first and foremost you’re not here as a human being only. You’re a spiritual being having a human experience.

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

People want to feel hopeful.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

You’ll see it when you believe it.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

I like to be creative.

I already am a product.

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

One thing I hope I’ll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

How one life turns out is not dependent on what people do to us or what they don’t do for us.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

I think that there is never an indispensable leader, you know? I think that there is a time with dignity that one needs to leave.