Michael Franti Quotes

I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

I relate to most of the characters I play, because I do feel like an outsider.

In college, I didn't know whether to hang out with the black kids or the white kids, and then I found the theatre kids, and I was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter.' We were all weird and listening to Morrissey and wearing Doc Martens so that was my tribe.

I can just talk about my world, and people relate to it because it's so familiar to them. It's them, it's not me. They're hearing themselves.

I'm no different than you.

We're all just trying to fit in and find ourselves, particularly when we're growing up.

I was a sullen kid who smoked cigarettes and wore black every day, and I went to a school that was lacrosse players and Izods.

I'm just like my fans, and that's the way I like it.

Orlando's a part of me. The next guy's a part of me. And the next guy's a part of me. That's all I'm trying to do, is tell cool stories that people can relate to.

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

The essential problems remain the same... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.

I was always a class clown, so I never had trouble fitting in; I just had trouble finding out where I really wanted to be.

I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

I definitely went through some dark teenage years. I wore black raccoon eyeliner every single day. I would be late to school if I didn't have time to put my eyeliner on.

I just always want to play people. I don't want it to be necessarily that you relate to the character as female or male, but that you relate to them as a person. That's the driving force.

I don't want to feel like I'm a television host - because I don't think that I am. What I really want to feel like is, I am you; I just happen to be here.

I realized that there's this fine line between being personal and being general and being alienating.

Most people think they don't have anything to relate to a drag queen, but shockingly there's a lot we can talk about.

I needed my own territory, and I didn't know how I was going to get it. And so I took my frustrations and plugged them into someone entirely different from me. I wanted to see if I could slip into someone else's skin.

What I have that's special in my music is substance. It's music that people can really relate to. I know I'm gonna rap something that somebody has already been through in their life, something that they will understand.

You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in.

I think unintentionally I gravitate towards concepts and topics that hit home or are something real we can all relate to.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.