Quotes About Self-preservation

The people who know me know I'm extremely private or try and be as private as I can with my personal life.

Think about being onstage playing these songs. I'm opening my personal life up to all these people. But I just can't get attached. I've got to separate myself from the music and lyrics.

Hey, you want to hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.

I say no to photographs. When people take my picture, I feel like they've taken a piece of me, and I can't get that back. It's soul-draining.

To be a geisha, you have to have to an iron-clad layer around you - around your physical body and your heart.

Most of the time, I don't really give people a chance. I have a wall up. I'm always protecting who I am. Thinking about my brand. I make it hard on people. Sometimes, it's a good thing. Sometimes, it's a bad thing.

I do always have a wall up. But I feel by doing it, I keep myself safe.

I got tired of going to places and people wanting to pick fights with me or to prove something themselves or their drunk friends, so I decided to stop going out.

Me di cuenta que me estaba confiando secretos que podían destruirlo. Aunque quizá no se tratara de una cuestión de confianza. Puede que fuera un problema de autoprotección. De pronto, para mí, la plata había pasado de ser un accesorio a una fuente potencial de muerte.

It was like being in a struggle for survival against a murderous foe, except I was the one who was fighting for survival and I was also the murderer within.

Limb by limb and tooth by tooth, Tearing up inside of me, Every day, every hour, just wish that I... Was bulletproof

Don't allow yourself to be killed by what's killing You within!

The closeted homosexual is far less likely to demand fair or just treatment for his kind, because to do so would call attention to himself.

I find the older I get - carrying this thing called fame - the more I close myself off. That's what you do.

I had to make some drastic choices to avoid losing myself.

The key emotion, when you grow up gay, lesbian, bi, trans, is shame. We chose what places we went to, chose the people we talked to, based on the idea of keeping ourselves safe.

I don't want to be like these guys having neck surgery, then you got to go have another surgery just to continue to play this game. I love this game but I love myself more.

People often express surprise that I'm not a psychopath. But it's not about what I want to do to other people, it's that I'm scared of what other people might do to me.

Remember, it is a deep principle of our nature not to regard the safety of those who do not regard their own. If you are indifferent to your own safety, you must not be surprised if those less interested should become more so.

Don't be a hero, young man. There's no percentage in it.

We die all the time to avoid being killed.

I prefer to die of thirst in my own planet than to be a character more in this sad story.

Your protectors' goals for your life revolve around keeping you away from all that pain, shame, loneliness, and fear, and they use a wide array of tools to meet those goals—achievements, substances, food, entertainment, shopping, sex, obsession with your appearance, caretaking, meditation, money, and so on.

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.