I love drag, and I love people who gravitate toward it. Because the people who do drag are people who dance to the beat of a different drummer.
— RuPaul
I've always idolized people who can write songs.
I'm ambitious. I work hard.
This is an important thing: People who live in the mainstream and the status quo think that everyone else is there to serve them.
I dance to the beat of a different drummer.
Life is not to be taken seriously.
I go to the gym at five in the morning and then go do a hike.
It's hard to get intimate with an audience.
I feel like I've won every year the show has been picked up by Logo because, really, nothing beats a paycheck.
Throughout my life, I have always believed in love; I've always put my heart in love. But I've seen fear take people so often. It's very scary.
I have always worked and did my work on the fringe, where I have feel very comfortable.
The only person I look up to - and not just in show business but also in the world - is a little lady named Judge Judy! Honestly.
A regular old drag queen is usually your science teacher who's actually wearing women's panties underneath his slacks. A drag-queen superstar is someone who actually works in clubs and makes a living doing it more than one night a year, or even one night in six months.
Don't believe the hype; don't believe what it tells you on your driver's license. You are an extension of the power that created this whole universe.
I always bring an orange scarf, not just so I can wear it or tuck it into my pocket, but also so I can throw it over a lamp in the hotel room. Orange is my favourite colour, and it gives a lovely, warm ambience.
La Flavour's 'Mandolay' is a disco classic - I dare you to sit still while listening to it.
My number one tip for all people, not just drag queens, is false eyelashes, which make every look go from daytime to glamazon!
Usually, people who don't have a broad perspective see gay people as servants - as people who are there to make them look good.
We humans are still a very primitive culture, and it's one of the traps we've fallen into over the course of our lives - to forget our history. That's why George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' is so profound. It chronicles our short memory.
Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.
Unfortunately, in our culture, one person can write a letter to the network, and they shut something down. It's unfortunate.
There's not another lip-synch song on the planet, in the history of lip-synching songs, that has been lip-synched more than 'I Will Survive.'
I've been very blessed, and that has not escaped me.
I'm not religious, but I do pray. It's 60 seconds of meditation, visualizing myself, looking at myself, and being conscious of my own consciousness. That will align me for the rest of the day.
The whole point is to live life and be - to use all the colors in the crayon box.
I love the creativity and the social and political aspects of drag.
From childhood, we're trained to be a certain way, to behave a certain way - so that the power base can control us, really. And punk and drag are completely outside of that.
I remember being 14 years old, making a pact with myself. I would never join into the matrix, never join into the status quo, and I would always fight it. It always felt like I was on an operating table and the anesthesia never worked.
Drag is involved with changing identities and not taking identities too seriously at all. That's why drag is such a hard sell to a network - or anyone, really - because it's up against the ego.
Wyoming - God bless you in Wyoming - it's very boring, and it's the most isolated place on Earth.
We encrypt 'Drag Race' with the secret language that kept gay people linked for many years before the '80s.
'The Wizard of Oz' is my favourite. It explains what life on this planet is about. Although Dorothy reaches Oz, she finds she had what she needed to go back to Kansas all along, but the Good Witch tells her that she had to learn it for herself. All of the answers to the meaning of life are there.
There are so many sensitive souls; they don't know what to do with their feelings.
We are all doing drag. Every single person on this planet is doing it.
I love Ashford & Simpson, and I love the Brothers Gibb. They are amazing.
It's true in everything, not just in drag: To be a success, you have to understand the landscape. You have to know thyself, and you have to know your history so that you can draw from people who have figured out the equation you are faced with. It's not rocket science.
People don't know how to place me in their consciousness. They think, 'Oh, you must be here to make me look good. That's what gay guys are, right? You're an accessory for my straight life.' Just because your limited view is that everyone's there to serve you and that you're the only person in the world. It doesn't work that way.
If you're upset by something I said, you have bigger problems than you think.
If you look at their voting habits and their eating habits, you realize people are stupid.
Once you clear out from your consciousness things that no longer matter, you're able to make room for other things.
I try to do three active things a day because I have to fit into costumes that are very tight.
I don't think drag will ever be mainstream because it's counter to what the mainstream directive is, which is picking an identity and sticking with it for the rest of your life.
I think our culture is moving forward - slowly. And also, as we move forward, we're witnessing some of the old stalwarts rejecting that forward motion.
It's important to find your tribe.
In our subconscious, we all know we're playing roles.
I think this life is hard without assistance from others.
It's a neutralizing mantra to say to everybody, 'I come in peace.' I come in peace. That's why it's important.
If you've worked in a factory, and you haven't learned how to do something else, you're obsolete. That's just nature.
Drag is there to remind culture not to take itself too seriously. All of this is illusion.
I enjoy being creative.
