Quotes About Validation

I like to fight where people respect me.

If people are watching your fights and they care about what you do then that is success to me. As far as I'm concerned, I am one of the most successful fighters in the world.

I may not be fighting the most popular guys like Canelo or GGG. But I am fighting real fighters, tough guys who want to prove that they belong and be world champions.

I spent my life figuring out ways to make the room OK with me.

People didn't like me; I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you're a little kid, and people are like, 'You're loud and awful,' you think, 'I guess I am awful,' so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.

If my boyfriend finds me sexy, then I don't need that kind of male attention from anyone else.

I mean there's something I have achieved in life, even if it's little, and if people write about it, then it's fine.

You can't let someone else lower your self-esteem, because that's what it is - self-esteem. You need to first love yourself before you have anybody else love you.

People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.

I've always wanted to be the first one to laugh at me. I didn't want to get up on stage and start doing something and have someone say, 'Are you serious? Do you think that's good?'

My thing is, for artists who are having success, being given an award shouldn't be the thing that defines you in the first place.

There are a lot of people who can now see me as an artist for the first time.

As a man of colour, I've spent my life asking people to see me for who I am. With Obama in the White House, it feels like people have finally caught up to where I've been most of my life.

For black people, everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Who am I - Canada's Rodney Dangerfield? I get no respect.

I mean, MTV or the mainstream media can tell you one thing, but when there are 40,000 people in front of you, who cares about all that?

When I get hate mail, I get really down on myself, and I read it to my mom, and my mom is like, 'So what? Who cares? These people don't know you, so you can't take the praise or the hate to heart.'

As a comedian, I don't know if they're laughing because it's funny or if they're laughing at me because I'm not funny. And I'm thinking, 'Who cares? They're laughing.' If you go on stage, and they're laughing at you full-on for 60 minutes? You know, whatever puts them in the seats.

We'll become in our lives whoever the people we love the most say we are.

Whoever you talk to, I'm either overrated or underrated. It's all who you to talk to.

I'd say, at the end of the day, you know, from a songwriting practice standpoint, you write songs to make yourself feel something true and validating, and cathartic, maybe, and then whoever responds to it is, like, out of your control.

I'm aware that I have a career. But, if I was the hottest in the game, songs all over the radio - let's say whoever produced made me super big. Like, that would be cool, but there would be something in me that goes, 'You only wrote the raps. You didn't make the beats. You didn't direct. You didn't do all that.'

Whoever you are, you have to prove your worth.