“Poetry itself is music. I’m just lucky that I can convert it into music.”

If you’ve got great parents, once you grow up and have to live by yourself, you’re going to create some fake self as you get comfortable wherever you are.

When you have a lot of fake selves, most of the time it’s because you haven’t had parents around so you try to build characters to protect yourself.

There’s a part in every person that has a fake self. We’ve had this since infancy due to our parents and our upbringing.

[My music] is opposite to fashion.

In fact, I might be confident for the human race because of what the human race has given me. When I was in the street and bars, people always came up to me and said, “Don’t stop, keep going.”

When I started singing about my life and what I was going through, I felt more confident. It was my own life, I was being myself, I was telling people what was happening.

We have the real self and the false self, there’s nothing wrong with them, and everyone has both of them.

When you look at the media and television, and all this Hollywood stuff, you just judge people.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it’s quite small and contained.

I have met a few people, who are so respected in the fashion industry and all around the world, and are still very humble. People who have it all but act like they only just started, it’s beautiful. This is what I want to be.

I wasn’t quite used to writing a diary – I didn’t understand why people did it – but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

I’m not dismissing prostitutes, but a lot has changed. This so-called gentrification, it can never be stopped.

When I started writing again, especially when I listened to French music and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, I realized that these lots talked about themselves. The greatest artists, they didn’t sing; they only spoke.

I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It’s amazing how we go to school when we’re so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don’t have to memorize anything.

The experience that I had in Paris I could never have ever again in my life. This is when I grew up as a young man.

The hero and the coward both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts his fear and converts it into fire.

The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.

Goals convert vision into ENERGY.

Believe in your dreams, convert them into action.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Once you believe in yourself and see your soul as divine and precious, you’ll automatically be converted to a being who can create miracles.

Convert bad news to good news.

Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw.