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

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

I’m so happy I discovered early how wonderful music makes me feel.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

The people in my songs are all me.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

I think country music is popular – has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.

Those outside the church expect followers of Christ to live differently, yet today many in church are chasing after the world – not to win them, but to be like them.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.

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.

My apartment is my stage, and my bedroom is my stage – they’re just not stages you’re allowed to see.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

My life is my argument.

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.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Joanne‘ is a progression for me. It was about going into the studio and forgetting that I was famous.

I think that I’ve had a very strange life.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you’re supposed to do.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

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

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

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

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.