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

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

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

I’m Mickey Mouse. They don’t know who’s inside the suit.

In the United States, I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity.

Fame itself… doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

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.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

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

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

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.

I don’t really like to call myself a brand, and I don’t like to think of myself as a brand. I’m a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that’s not my focus.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

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

I think and that is all that I am.

It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy’s autograph. I’d tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, ‚People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.‘ But she couldn’t really grasp it.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.

I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‚See, you did it yourself.‘

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.

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.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

When people say ‚marriage‘ to me… It’s always a means to an end. Everyone’s so in a rush to define the relationship.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

That is what fame is, isn’t it? To get the world to fall in love with you.

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.