“You can’t always get what you want.”

I don’t think enjoying life is an exclusive prerogative of young people.

I’m not the businessman. I don’t deal with the business at all. Not anymore. Occasionally, every four years or five years, they tell me I’ve run out of money, I have to go and make some more.

The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.

A good thing never ends.

I always think it’s better to be not taking drugs or drinking or anything. That’s not saying I’ve never done it because I have. But I sort of learned I think after a while there has been – it didn’t take me that long to realize that it wasn’t a good thing.

I don’t only like rock music. There are other forms of music that I find interesting. I would want to do everything, every kind of music. I wouldn’t want to be limited to like playing heavy metal or whatever.

I don’t really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn’t really worry me even if it’s like out of place. At least it’s relevant.

I don’t want to be a rock star all my life. I couldn’t bear to end up like Elvis Presley in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags.

I think it’s very important that you have at least some sort of inner thing you don’t talk about. That’s why I find it distasteful when all these pop stars talk about their habits.

You never really know what’s going to happen. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they’re going to behave.

I don’t like being completely isolated. I need the energy from other people.

In England you’re skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.

Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.

I think people are afraid to express their opinions half the time.

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don’t know what really matters.

Of course we’re doing it for the money. We’ve always done it for the money.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

When I went to college, as much as my parents emphasized academic achievement, they emphasized marriage even more. They told me that the most eligible women marry young to get a ‘good man’ before they are all taken.

The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don’t expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don’t.

I think I can improve a lot. I think I can get a lot better. I feel like there’s much, much more I can do.

I’m not a celebrity. I’m just the same Simone. I just have two Olympic Gold medals now.

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

Until women are as ambitious as men, they’re not gong to achieve as much as men.

Every labourer is a father, his labour is his child. Choose your project carefully and achieve it worthily