When you have mental illness you don't have a plaster or a cast or a crutch, that let everyone know that you have the illness, so people expect the same of you as from anyone else and when you are different they give you a hard time and they think you're being difficult or they think you're being a pain in the ass and they're horrible to you. You spend your life in Ireland trying to hide that you have a mental illness.
Sinead O'ConnorI have always had a good functioning in my artistic life, but I had problems mostly in my private life, I got very angry with my boyfriends and stuff...I would probably have good reasons to be angry but the volume would be too high, just getting to some level of wounding that perhaps was not appropriate to the actual offence committed.
Sinead O'ConnorI seek no longer to be a 'famous' person, and instead I wish to live a 'normal' life.
Sinead O'ConnorThere's a weighing kind of overemphasis on sexuality, which disempowers music generally, because it silences all the other voices; it makes music a very powerless force for changing the world.
Sinead O'ConnorI think a lot of artists go waving their Grammies around thanking God for their Grammy, but when it comes to a pitch battle in the street for the honor of God, none of them is anywhere to be found.
Sinead O'ConnorForgiveness is the most important thing. We all have to forgive what was done to us - the Irish people have to forgive. The African people. The Jewish people. We all have to forgive and understand the only way to stop the cycle of hate and abuse is not to allow yourself to get caught in it.
Sinead O'Connor