Quotes By Ani DiFranco

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

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.

People need something or someone to fasten themselves to in order to reassure themselves that they are real.

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'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.

I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous.

If I'm gonna go down I'm gonna do it with style. You won't hear me surrender, you won't hear me confess cause you've left me with nothing but I have worked with less.

Before Katrina, you didn't see criticism of the Bush administration in the media. Here they are, stealing elections, enacting illegal wars, huge crimes against humanity and democracy, and you didn't even see criticism. It wasn't until Katrina that people started to come down on them.

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.

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.

I don't care if they eat me alive, I've got better things to do then survive.

Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked 'other.'