I felt like I was homeless anyway, so the change in environment wasn’t that much of a big deal. I felt pretty much the same. After six months of living on the streets [in Camden], I started singing, busking.
BENJAMIN CLEMENTINEI loved English literature – if didn’t it would have been hard – but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.
More Benjamin Clementine Quotes
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I’m from a middle class family but my father squandered all the money, so I didn’t really run around with rich people. I was very judgmental towards a lot of them.
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Confidence came from people. I think I’m very confident in me, as a human being.
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Some people will never be able to get their real self, but that’s fine, because their fake self is also part of them.
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The real self is who you are when you’re at home, when you’re comfortable, and the false self is what you’re pretending – and the reason you pretend is because you want to create a character for the surroundings you’re within.
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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.
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You can’t judge people by their cover.
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Composing was more difficult than writing things down.
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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.
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We’re all competent in different ways, we’ve just got to find a way to push ourselves up more.
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I think it is all about creating characters, mixing them up with the stars and the light-years, and coming back to Earth, because we’re from this universe. We’re not just New York or London; we’re stars.
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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.
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Happiness is overrated and money can’t justify it.
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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.
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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.
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I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
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