If you're secure in yourself, and even if you're not secure in yourself, you don't need to bully.
— Joan Jett
Partly, I like a bad reputation. But I also want a reputation of being a good person.
I left my family, and I left my brother and sister, and I went and lived my dream. I saw everybody, but is it ever enough?
If you really believe in yourself, you cannot listen to other people.
People are very sincere in their praise, and you can't take it lightly.
Cutting meat out of your diet is the best thing you can do for animals and your own health.
I leave for the show at least an hour ahead, and I do some vocal warm-ups, and that's pretty much it.
For me the challenge isn't to be different but to be consistent.
I don't like to say where I'll be in 10 years.
I have a tough time judging myself.
God, I always just think of myself as a jeans and T-shirt kind of person.
The follow your dreams thing is really important because so many people are railroaded into taking other paths by their family, their friends, people who should be supportive going, 'What are you talking about?' Even just seemingly regular career paths, but if it's not what people expect for you they kind of react funny.
You follow any family around, you're going to see elation, you're going to see disharmony.
I'm a good person.
I know music is subjective.
Nobody knows what anticipation is anymore. Everything is so immediate.
Disharmony is natural in any band.
We all make judgments on people, but some are much more brutal than others. It's easy to say, 'Ya know, I'm not crazy about what she's wearing,' but you don't have to be nasty about it, and you don't have to be public about it.
I don't look good in beige.
One of the mistakes I made was believing that the rock n' roll genre as a genre was much more free than the whole pop or R&B scene.
People like to tear you down. People are always going to take shots. You've just got to go for it.
My job is intense. It's very physical.
I do not knowingly kill any living thing - including insects or rodents - and I thank my food for sustaining me.
It's easier to sit there and say you don't like feminists because they don't have a sense of humor.
A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues.
I want to be singing to everybody, and I want everybody to think that I'm singing to them. Guys, girls and everyone in between.
Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going out and partying and all the things that I grew up writing about, I want to write about deeper things.
Women are still second-class citizens.
I bought one of those Learn How to Play Guitar Chords By Yourself and it shows you the diagram where to put your hands and I took that in my room, sat with my singles and learned how to play guitar.
I'm not necessarily intimidated by really jocky guys. I can talk football with them, you know what I mean?
I love school. I was a great student.
I like the way black looks. I think I look better in darker clothes. And maybe the fact that I wear black so much makes me more aware of putting people at ease. The black is sort of the bad-guy guise, so I work overtime to make people comfortable.
Pop music is not a threatening style of music.
A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.
Even though everybody's lives are different, in general we're all human beings, and we go through the same things: disappointments, the pleasures of life, life and death. That's always been a really big part of the show to me, making sure the audience feels connected, and that carries through to the album.
I think I look better in darker clothes. And maybe the fact that I wear black so much makes me more aware of putting people at ease.
Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.
Performance-wise, you really need to be down in the trenches; you need to do the hard work, for a lot of reasons: To build yourself as a performer, to get a sense of the audience, to work hard and to wonder, 'Do I really want to do this?'
Factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems. The meat industry causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world.
You want to have butterflies in your stomach, because if you don't, if you walk out onstage complacent, that's not a good thing.
When you're onstage and the audience is smiling and singing and bopping along and you're all on the same level, it's the best feeling in the world. It may sound dumb and corny to say it, but it's like pure love.
I don't know if I get recognized necessarily, though I do get looked at a lot - but I don't know if it's because of who I am, or if people just think I look weird.
Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.
I'm not a list person.
I'll be working until I die.
I've done some acting and a lot of different things, but mostly it's the music.
Things work in cycles.
I was in drama, wanted to be an actor.
I remember times when I was at shows and the person onstage locked eyes with me. And in that moment, everything was right with the world. I think that's part of my job, to create these thousands of moments every night. And for the rest of their life, they can say, 'You guys looked at me,' or 'You sweated on me,' or 'I got your gum.'
The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it.
