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

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

Things do not change; we change.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

At 155, I will be the same animal, an even better animal.

There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

We are in the throes of a transition where every publication has to think of their digital strategy.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. ‚Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.‘ First of all, my girl is black: she’s Jamaican.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

Sometimes I’m fascinated with how famous my work could be while I’m not so famous.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

This man is frank and earnest with women. In Fresno, he’s Frank and in Chicago he’s Ernest.

When you think of the exponential speed and scale of expansion of social media or a service, you have to believe that it is equally possible to rapidly transform the lives of those who have long stood on the margins of hope.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

I am what I am. A fighter.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

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

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

Being a kid’s not easy. You’re transforming and becoming a human being. At some point, you have everyone taking care of you, and then, all of a sudden, you’re out in the world.

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.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

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.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

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.

India has to be transformed into a developed nation, a prosperous nation and a healthy nation, with a value system.

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.

I groan daily under a body of sin and corruption. Oh for the time when I shall drop this flesh, and be free from sin!

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.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

We got rid of a terrible dictator. We gave the Iraqi people an opportunity for a new life under a representative form of government.

I am desperate for change – now – not in 8 years or 12 years, but right now.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

I get really restless when I haven’t worked for a day and a half. I have a recurring dream that people are lined up next to my bed, waiting for autographs and taking pictures of me!

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

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

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

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.