“All the adversity I've had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me…”

Billy Joe Shaver: Outlaw Country's Real Deal (2014)

"Chinese Modern Literature Laureate Expected to Become Centenarian" in People's Daily (13 August 2001) http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/english/200108/13/eng20010813_77134.html

Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: "Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

From "The Diary of Billy Talent":

Interview at the 1989 Australian Grand Prix, November 1989 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6brLntJE8s

[Thomas, Marlo, 2004, The Right Words at the Right Time, 229, Simon and Schuster, 978-0-743-44650-1]