The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

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.

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.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

I am what I am. A fighter.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

I feel Anglo-American.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian.

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn’t very good-looking. But in his own way he’d always save the day.

I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

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

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

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

Going home helps the content.

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.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

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

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Everyone looks at your watch and it represents who you are, your values and your personal style.

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.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

There are some teams and logos you see, no matter where you are in the world, and you know exactly who they are and what they mean.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

I look at other people’s lives, and some people feel like they’re too old to play with toys. But I still go through the toy section at the store, ‚cause there were toys that I wanted when I was little that I couldn’t have. So I still get them.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side, not the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

It’s a very strange thing being recognized or looked upon as someone special.

I think it speaks of all women having those few special things that make them feel feminine. And so when I was a little girl, I would associate Guerlain with that.

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.