The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don’t like it, actually.

I was a Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan fan growing up.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I’d hear a loud ‚A-hem!‘ from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

I loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. When I was five years old, I was already wearing a cowboy hat and suit. When I grew up, I knew John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas and so on.

I want everybody to understand that I am an American Negro first before I am a member of any political party.

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can’t not be what everyone says I am. But I don’t feel like an icon.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don’t think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you’ve done up to now.

The little man is still a man.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.

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.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful. At the same time, even though he had women in his life when I was a kid, there wasn’t any consistency.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

Getting recognized is insane. It just blows my mind. Like, someone who you don’t know at all can just be like, ‚Oh my God – are you Billie?‘

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

I’m nobody, who are you?

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

I was a huge Mike Tyson fan growing up; his fights were always on in my house.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.

You don’t go to Notre Dame to learn something; you go to Notre Dame to be somebody.

I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

I don’t really like to call myself a brand, and I don’t like to think of myself as a brand. I’m a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that’s not my focus.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on the outside!

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.