If I let myself sink into depression, I won't be able to get out. And then I'll be awfully unhappy. I just have to turn my face to the light and walk on. And trust that things will be all right.
Marianne Faithfull
My happiness is very fragile.
I'm a Capricorn, and they flower late.
Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.
I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.
I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.
I've got to where I've always wanted to be. I just feel more myself, and I've learned not to care what other people think. It's happened slowly, very slowly. But I did it.
Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.
I was told that I had very likely been clinically depressed for a long, long time, probably since I was 15, or even 14. It explained, to me at least, a lot of my behaviour over the years.
I love the Stones, but I've gone to a lot of gigs.
I was anorexic in the '60s and '70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now.
My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they'd pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting.
I don't talk about my private life.
The food that's never let me down in life is porridge, especially with milk and maple syrup, which is delicious. Paris isn't a porridge place, but I can buy it in London when I'm there and bring it back with me.
The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.
I wish people didn't just think of me in the '60s. I'm not any era.
I took drugs because we all took drugs.
I get all dressed up with that Marianne Faithfull face, and the next thing I know, I'm blurting out things that I shouldn't, trying to get attention when, really, I've got everybody's attention already.
Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!
Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.
All I can say is I've been lucky with my body. Well done, little body. I praise it and say, 'You're very good.'
I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.
Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I've had lots of shocks because it's as though I don't learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.
The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.
I know for a fact that Heaven and Hell are here on Earth.
I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.
The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.
I think I'm really powerful. They'll smash me, probably.
I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.
I haven't got purity, and I don't think I ever did. I have always been, even as a child, a very decadent little person.
I do take care of myself; I get my nails done, and I have a skin doctor, but that's it. I'm clean and groomed.
The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.
I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.
When you are 18, 19, 20, you're used to being photographed all the time, in a certain way. So, the narcissism becomes almost out of control. And the way that young women are photographed, they become addicted to this feedback of the image.
I never like photos of myself in the beginning. I live with them for three months, put them in a drawer, take them out and look again. I hate the way I look, but of course it's really not that bad.
I'd love to play a musician in a film.
I am not frightened of much, but I wouldn't like to get ill.
I have to watch out for being lazy.
Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.
I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.
I thought I wanted to go to drama school or university, and that would have been a completely different life. But what got me was the sound, and hearing it. Hearing everything so loud, I loved that back in the studio. I loved that from the very beginning.
The equipment you've got really dictates what you're going to do. When I started touring, there were no monitors, so I had to take the sound from the hall, and of course it was on a delay, so I would sing, and then I would hear it back, but later. It was very weird.
I live a very nice life. I have a wonderful time. But it's not lived drawing on a full level. I'm relaxed, cool, and enjoying it.
Working with David Bowie was very interesting, but I couldn't surrender to it. I should have let him produce a record for me, but I'm very perverse in some ways. He's brilliant, but the entourage were rather daunting.
I focus on the individual and not seeing this great big monster, 'the press.'
I've done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go.
I do have a strong sense of God. It's impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.
I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.
I'm having a great life, and I want to go on having one.
I'm not sure yet what my higher mission is, but I have a feeling it might be great. Before, I thought my mission was death, but now my mission is life.
