Quotes By Ani DiFranco

I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap.

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

I really have been enjoying performing more lately than I have in a long time and you know, it's all about that sort of centered feeling that I have now. You know, thanks to, not just my kid, but her father before her. You know, I have a kind of a grounding through them that I really relish, and I think is also good for my work, you know.

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.

If you like it, let it be, and if you don't please do the same.

I don't know if there are artists out there who love their own records. I haven't met any, and I'm kind of extreme in the other direction, but therein lies the impetus to keep working and keep making new songs and new records.

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.

I'm searching, as we all are, for ways to feel good about myself. Certainly, looking in the mirror doesn't do it!

Taken out of context I must seem so strange.

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.'

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

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

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.'

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 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 seriously hate pop music and all things super-commercial.

Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there's no escape, there's no excuse, so just suck up and be nice.

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

I'm a little hibernating animal. Anonymity is one of my favorite things. I mean, that's why I moved to New York when I was like 18, because there, there are just so many people that there's no one and you're just lost. You're completely invisible and I find that very liberating.

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.

A lot of women these days, a lot of young women don't want to call themselves feminists. You have this cheap, hideous 'girl power' sort of fad, which I think is pretty benign at best, but at worst, I think it's a way of taking the politics out of feminism and making it some kind of fashion.

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

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

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

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

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.