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

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’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.

If I’m being forced to do something I don’t want to do, my real self comes out. But whether or not I’m aware of it, no matter what happens, I’m always going to have a fake self and I’m not going to judge my fake self.

I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.

Stop judging yourself and appreciate how lucky you are every day.

I knew I was blessed with a gift of having both parents.

Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.

Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.

I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But many others were also in the same place. The difference was that I took action.

The harder I prepare, the luckier I seem to get.

I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.