Quotes By Ani DiFranco

Taken out of context I must seem so strange.

There isn't much I have to say, that I wouldn't rather just shut up and do.

I hate it when people don't recognize the work of women as being universal, or having any import to the world at large, as opposed to men's work, which is generally tends to be seen as more universal - men's writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.

I see a lot of connections between folk and punk music just because they're both subcorporate music - I mean, traditionally.

Being a parent has taught me a lot of things already, you know, though it's only been a year and half, and has made me address parts of myself that I would otherwise live in comfortable denial of, or you know and - you know, for instance, my self-loathing.

I've been collecting some more high-end guitars. I have an old Martin D28 from the '60s, a beautiful, classic Martin that I know I played on 'Mariachi.'

I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in between.

I have something to prove, as long as I know there's something that needs improvement, and you know that everytime I move, I make a woman's movement.

We have to be able to criticise what we love, to say what we have to say 'cause if your not trying to make something better, than as far as I can tell, you are just in the way.

I've been saying the Occupy Movement has got the ball rolling, and now we need to take the fight to the great indoors!

Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society.

I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.

Why do you think I write these feminist songs, to try and teach myself to respect myself. You know, it's not because I'm a hero.

Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.

All of youth culture is packaged and sold back to us at this furious rate these days. I think it's part and parcel to this corporate encroachment on our lives in general.

Taking me seriously is a big mistake. I certainly wouldn't.

Someone's got to be interested in how I feel, just because I'm here and I'm real.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

In order to keep anything cultural, logical, or ideological, you have to reinvent the reality of it.

I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing 'chick' music for teenage girls or something. I think, if anything, the press kind of, because of my gender and my age, tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It's part of the cultural dynamic, I guess.

Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends. But, there's nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.

These days, my main guitar amps have been Magnatone. They're beautiful. Magnatones have actual tremolo, which I recently learned about guitar amps. Often what guitar amps call vibrato is really just a volume Up and Down. But Magnatone has a true vibrato, which is pitch bending. And so, it's just a lush sound.

My songs are just little letters to me.

It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there's me.

I've been a long time coming, and I'll be a long time gone. You've got your whole life to do something, and that's not very long.

Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'

They taught me different was wrong.

Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.