Annie Lennox Quotes

Over the years, I was never really driven to become a solo artist, but I was curious to find out who I was as an individual creative person. It's taken some time, but now I feel I've truly paid my dues. I guess I'm at a point now where I'm more comfortable in my own skin.

I really think I've found me finally in the music. You know, I had put an album out before, 'Embrace Me,' and it's been seven years since that. So I was discovering who I was. And I still am discovering, but I think now I know a little bit more of who I am. So that's what's pushing me.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I'm very, very grateful; it's a fun job. It's a luxury.

I want to write, I want to sing. I want to do the same thing for others, have my music, hopefully do that for others one day, not realizing what I sort of had to climb. I had an idea a little bit, but I think that I underestimated the whole thing.

I do love the evolution of people in general. I think it's a beautiful thing when someone progresses and evolves in life.

When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly not voted 'Most Literary Boy.' I can assure you I was not voted 'Mostly Likely to Succeed.' I was voted 'Most Musical Boy.' And the music led to the poetry.

I know how I want to operate as an artist. And that is by having an honest, genuine dialogue about this kind of screwed up journey I've had that I'm so thankful for.

There are people who are uncanny, who are finished products at a young age. I wasn't, thank God.

Life is about growth. People are not perfect when they're 21 years old.

But at this phase of my life, I want to write and not have to think about whether a song is going to be a hit. I want to explore the music that inspires me, and I don't want to ape myself.

It took me a while to accept everything, but I am so grateful for the way my parents raised me. It's my life, it's unique, and I think it's so meaningful to me as I get older.

It is said an artist spends their whole life trying to get to the place where their heart was first opened up. 'Rent' was that place for me.

I believe later in life I'm gonna change my name when I start making the right music.

I've been on shows that are very comedic and happy, and you really only get to see one side of my personality. They're not shows about my life or my music, or my struggle or anything like that. They're shows where you pretty much see me laughing and smiling all the time.

My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.

I'd promised my parents that I'd go to college, take the time to grow up a bit, and experience something different before really pursuing music.

There's a lot to the story. And there are a lot of things I've learned about myself and about love, and I'm really grateful for the lessons, and I hope I can share that through art. I look for projects that allow me to do that, whether it's music or acting.

As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together. This happened in 1989. Since then, it's been a long road of educating myself in every possible way.

With acting, I started as a kid and it was my safe space and the place where I felt the most free to be all of myself. What gets explored in our show is where that instinct starts and where it meets with career, and how that can change your path a bit.

What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.

Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

When I am making music, I am growing at the same time, ain't I?

Where I'm at now is awesome. A different road might have led me to a different place, and I wouldn't be happy doing anything but music.

Each movie was a challenge for me, as a man, as an actor. After each movie, something changed in my life, in my character.

I always wanted to be an artist. I think I was just waiting on somebody to approve me and be like, "Oh, okay, you should be an artist," you know 'cause it wasn't until I stopped looking for approval that I could actually do it.