Identity Quotes

You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.

Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.

I am the Lizard King. I can do anything!

I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.

There is a very modest side to me too. How far away from me is the image? It's about 20 steps away.

It would be so helpful for the straight community to see men in powerful positions coming out and saying "I'm gay" so they don't have these preconceived notions that all gay men are smarmy idiots living on the street or whatever it is people think of gay men. I think it would be really helpful and productive.

Diva is a female version of a hustler.

Everyone calls me Bruno; they don't ever call me Peter - that was just my government name.

Too many girl rush into relationships because of the fear of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. Don't do that.

I'm a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect.

When I cut my hair, the whole sound changed, my style changed.

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna - that's an idea of who I am.

I am, and always will be, a blues guitarist.

I had no idea how to do that, because I was either above or below everybody. I was either towering above as Clapton the guitar virtuoso, or cringing on the floor, because if you took away my guitar and my musical career, then I was nothing.

My identity shifted when I got into recovery. That's who I am now, and it actually gives me greater pleasure to have that identity than to be a musician or anything else, because it keeps me in a manageable size. When I'm down on the ground with my disease-which I'm happy to have-it gets me in tune. It gives me a spiritual anchor. Don't ask me to explain.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried.

I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.

You're born with the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.