Jackson Browne Quotes

The more time we invest imitating others, the less that's available to discover and be ourselves.

You don't want to spend your life explaining yourself.

The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

Yeah, it's nice to look up to people, but the more you try to be somebody else, the less you are of yourself.

There's room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you're trying to be like somebody else, then there is isn't.

Somebody once told me I shouldn't try to change Hollywood. That isn't my point at all. I don't want Hollywood to change me.

I've tried not to get too bogged down by what people want you to be.

I certainly wouldn't want to be a Mini Me of any of the people whose footsteps I've followed in.

What I would tell everyone is don't lose your sense of individuality.

I don't want to be someone else.

Whatever takes your fancy, you should do it without worrying what will people think. Otherwise, you will get stuck, like how some get stuck in a lover boy image or in an action image.

When you're growing up, the most important thing is to try to not change yourself too much. Be you, because everyone else is taken.

You start comparing yourself to other people, you end up trying to be that person. You've got to be your own person, do it your own way. You can be motivated by somebody, but you don't have to take after them.

The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? That meddling ape imitation, as soon as we come to years of indiscretion, (so let me speak,) snatches the pen, and blots out nature's mark of separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental individuality. The lettered world no longer consists of singulars: it is a medley, a mass; and a hundred books, at bottom, are but one.

Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?

You are who you are. It doesn't make any point to go out and buy the Top 40 albums to see what those acts are doing. There's no point in hearing what's going on. The only thing that's going on is what's been going forever. It's just that some people dig that bag and some people dig the other bag.

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.

They tell me what to wear, how to look, what I should say, how I should be. Until recently I had given into that pressure, I lost sight of who I was. I listened to opinions of people and I tried to change who I am because I thought others would accept me for it. And I realized I don't know how to be anything but myself.

How much more interesting life would be if only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of abjectly understudying some one else!

I have never been convinced throughout my life that one needs to be imitating others. I even tell my daughters not to look at me as a model.

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

It is finally when you let go of what people expect you to be and people's perceptions of you that you're able to be the version of yourself that you're supposed to be - like in God's eyes. It doesn't matter if you're half crazy, or eccentric, or whatever it is - that you have to be true to who you were born to be.