I never wanted to be Marilyn – it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

Death means change our clothes. Clothes become old, then time to come change. So this body become old, and then time come, take young body.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

There’s a long way to fall when you pretend that you’re so far away from the earth, far away from reality, floating in a bubble that’s protected by fame or success. It’s scary, and it’s the thing I fear the most: to be swallowed up by that bubble. It can be poison to you, fame.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

I hate being called an ‚icon.‘ I just don’t like it. That’s all there is to it.

I wanted to be famous for my music and my talent, and I always wished I could cut it out when I left the stage.

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

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

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.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.

If I had a time machine, I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

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.‘

Life is a lively process of becoming.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

I don’t think I could think of a single thing that’s more isolating than being famous.

I just hope people don’t get sick of us. I’m sick of us and I’m in Destiny’s Child.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

I’ve been talked about by a lot better people than the general public.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

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

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

I don’t call up the press and say, ‚Look at me!‘

My 2020 Vision for India is to transform it into a developed nation. That cannot be abstract; it is a lifeline.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

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

I went from being the Terminator to being the governator.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

When I started out, I didn’t have any desire to be an actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.

Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman. I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.

See, ‚A Time to Kill‘ was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

I feel Anglo-American.

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

I hope when I’m dead I’ll be considered an icon, though.

I didn’t think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I’m not put together like the other chaps.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

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.

I have now exactly the same weight I had when I was 18, 20.

Developing nations want to become developed nations.