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.
— Marianne Faithfull
Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.
I'd love to play a musician in a film.
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.
I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.
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 think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.
The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.
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've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.
I have to watch out for being lazy.
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.
The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.
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.
Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!
I took drugs because we all took drugs.
The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.
I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.
I am not frightened of much, but I wouldn't like to get ill.
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 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.
Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.
The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.
I think I'm really powerful. They'll smash me, probably.
I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.
