Cat Stevens Quotes

I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I felt I could only be myself when I was alone, that I turned into some kind of novelty. The only way I could get through that time was to drink. I poisoned myself with alcohol for years but I've never been into drugs in the way it was sometimes made out.

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing all the hype that's written about you... Who knows? In a couple of years, you might find me in the loony bin!

Fame made me insecure and insular. I wanted to run away from being me.

I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you're not sure if you are one.

Honestly I try to stay away from what has been written about me because if you let that stuff get to you and it's not true, it can drive you crazy.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

You know the theory of cell irritability? If you take an amoeba cell and poke it a thousand times, it will change and then re-form into its original shape. And then, the thousandth time you poke this amoeba, the cell will completely collapse and become nothing. That's kind of what it's like being famous. People say hi, how are you doing, and after the thousandth time, you just get angry; you really pop.

Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free

Everybody's still miserable in the same way they've always been miserable, and more and more of my friends - especially my male friends - find themselves taking anti-anxiety, psychotropic drugs. It seems like everybody I know is wondering if they're really who they are, or once the prescription runs out, will they become someone different?

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means- the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.

Amidst all of these flashing lights I pray the fame won't take my life.

It's what people know about themselves inside that makes them afraid.

I try to put myself in the shoes of people in the news. I'm in the news myself quite a lot. But there's many days I give thanks I'm not in the news and the news that's out there.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.

I find it really frustrating when people go, "I want to be famous and glamorous like you."

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not kill myself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybe I shouldn't kill myself.

I always found myself trying to cover the mental anguish and the torment and the abuse that I was dealing with. That made me always question my beauty, my intelligence, and a lot of other things about myself.

My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.

While I was girl of the year and superstar and all that crap, everything I did was really...motivated by psychological disturbance.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

I didn't have any definition of self. I never fit in, so I started pretending I was other people. I'd find people I thought were cool and dress how they dressed, talk how they talked, do whatever they were into. This led to a period of drugs and anchohol. When his family gave him an ultimatum to get clean or they'd report him to the police Corey said, "I was done fighting myself. I finally said, "I'm gonna start looking at my life and figure out why I'm doing this.