To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

I like to be myself, and I don’t pretend. For instance, I don’t dress up for occasions; I am what I am.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

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

We cannot live being obsessed with what other people think about us. It’s impossible to live like that. Not even God managed to please the entire world.

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

The only answer to fear is faith in God, knowing He loves you unconditionally and individually.

We are all special cases.

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

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

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

I’m not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

I am not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other motion picture company.

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you – until you get your revenge.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.

I’m not who people expect me to be. I’m not Henry Kissinger.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

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

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

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

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.

In business or in life, don’t follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

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.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

When I arrived, at first a lot of people were like, ‚This kid is different.‘

I’m on the autism spectrum. I don’t usually follow social coding and so therefore I go my own way.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.