“Don’t listen to what people tell you because they’ll try to bring you down. And don’t listen to yourself, either, because yourself will try to bring you down even more so than anyone else. As long as you just put all your energy into one thing, it can happen.”

“Like sometimes when a coach is behind you, they don’t really know how you feel. It’s hard for me to tell him, because I’m also thinking. If the coach and I think the same thing, that’s good, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. Then do you listen to the coach, or do you listen to yourself?”

“Don’t lie to yourself with affirmations. Don’t lie to the world by pretending to be who you want to be whilst rejecting who you are in this moment. You only want to be different than who you really are because long ago, someone rejected the truth of you and you have been trying to mold yourself into something false so as to be accepted ever since.”

“They will always tell you that you can't do what you want to do, but you can do what you want to do. You just have to believe in yourself. The system is to bring you down, but you can rise up.”

“No matter how hard you work to bring yourself up, there's someone out there working just as hard, to put you down. ”

“To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can't let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.”

“A lot of people try to boil down creation to just one thing and "what are you gonna do next" as if there's always a ladder to climb and it's like, the ladder is what you make for yourself, right?”

“What Alvin figured out was that when you’re Making, you don’t use people like tools. You don’t wear them out to achieve your purpose. You wear yourself out helping them achieve theirs. You wear yourself out teaching and guiding, persuading and listening to advice and letting folks persuade you, when it happens they’re right.”

“Drugs don’t work. They don’t even make you forget – only momentarily, because if something’s that painful, nothing’s going to make you forget it. You think they’ll fill the hole, but the hole just gets deeper… It’s like trying to fill in a hole without a spade.”

“I've had a lot of ups and downs, and listen, to still be putting yourself out there on stage at my age, you come against a lot of stuff. But if you love what you do, no one should let the opinions of others take away their joy or take away their dreams. And that's really all it comes down to. Loving yourself, believing in yourself, putting one foot in front of the other and doing it.”