Alan Cohen Quotes

I don't like being told what to do, and I don't need to be told what my record should sound like.

You can wear whatever, be whatever, do whatever you want.

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

I am trying to be true to the work that I want to do and be allowed to make the choices that I want to make.

I am not defined to be in any mould and I can be whatever I want to be.

Can't nobody make you make any music that you don't wanna make. Remember that.

My message to women: Do what makes you feel good, because there'll always be someone who thinks you should do it differently. Whether your choices are hits or misses, at least they're your own.

Don't live your life to please other people.

I'm not going to become anybody I don't want to become.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

I have the freedom to take chances, to say no. I have the freedom to be who I really want to be, rather than have to conform to this or that just to stay alive.

Whatever I do, I do it because I want to do it and because it's completely, 100% me.

True freedom is the capacity for acting according to one's true character, to be altogether one's self, to be self-determined and not subject to outside coercion.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

I care so much about making things that are useful for people to have and listen to, but I don't care so much that I won't do whatever the hell I want. It's just one of those things.

I know I'm not gonna please everybody when I make a record. I don't let that affect any of my decisions.

I would never wear anything because someone told me to.

I would never tell someone else how to use their platform, because I think I'm much more comfortable allowing the work that I do to speak for itself.

I've had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making. Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn't allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines.

No one told us what to wear, what to write, what to play. When they tried to, we shot 'em down easily.

I have this original style that I want to show to the world. I don't want to be kind of this beat down, bruise-you-up kind of dude and have Karl Anderson cut all my promos for me. I don't want to have to do that.

There's nothing, nobody can pay me enough money and nobody can do enough for me to wear something I don't want.

I have to follow my own vision.