Not to be rude to my sisters, but I don't listen to drag music. I listen to everything from punk to Italo disco to Appalachian country music, but I don't know what their records sound like. I hardly listen to my own records. I'm like Cher!
— Sharon Needles
After I went on 'Drag Race,' I was allowed to do so many things. I was allowed to do theater, commercial work, television work, modeling, fashion design, and it was great. But the thing with reality television fame is that it's got a pretty quick expiration date.
I remember when I wore UFO raver jeans in the 90s. Or my JNCOs! I miss my JNCOs.
My concept is drag queens are not a reflection of society, they are a fun house reflection of society where we bend, and twist and manipulate the anxieties we all feel.
Drag culture has always been about excess.
The great thing about being a woman is the power of reinvention.
I don't care how many times I play 'Angry Birds.' When you have the world's cares on your shoulders and you fling those little birds at those rotten pigs, then the whole world just melts away.
I don't socialize in drag anymore. If I'm in drag, I'm usually onstage or in the dressing room or in a car service.
Jason Voorhees was a kid who was picked on at summer camp, and Michael Myers was someone vilified by his own family. I think that's why gay people like horror movies, because it's seeking revenge on the privileged.
I come from what we call the pre-'Drag Race' drag world where I didn't start doing this with aspirations of being a reality television star, or this going any further than the small smoky bars of Pittsburgh.
In the entertainment industry women are often judged. They judge bigger women, they judge black women, and older women too. We just don't do that in drag. Drag is open to everyone, regardless of gender, body shape or age.
Everyone loves puppets.
I'm obsessed with celebrities and fame. I always will be.
Sharon Needles is definitely Pittsburgh - always rough around the edges, a little ignorant, a little uneducated. And she's dead. And Pittsburgh is, after all, the zombie capital of the world, a little financially lower class, and just all-around a gritty, rough city.
PG-13' is kind of a scattered, almost movie soundtrack album, with elements of punk and metal and electronica.
I love Halloween. I mean, yes, I consider every day to be Halloween, but it's a very special day for me.
My brain is a great fashion designer. Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to do it.
Monster Mash' is one of those great, throwback Halloween songs.
My house is a mixture of mid-century 'Brady Bunch' and the Addams family, so it's not uncommon to find vials of blood in my house.
Some people say, 'Oh you're a weird queen. You're a punk queen.' All queens are weird! I don't care if you're in a sickening gown or dressed as an octopus. You are treating every day as if it were Halloween. You are donning a character and a persona that isn't real.
I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I'm not the 'Titanic,' I'm 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' I'm not a blockbuster, I'm a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.
The secret to a great Halloween costume, and I can't stress this enough, is in my opinion is to extract sexuality out of your costume.
I was really into the bimbo archetype that filled late 80s-early 90s TV when I was growing up. You know, women circling the want ads with nail polish, Rhonda Shear from 'U.S.A. Up All Night,' Peggy Bundy.
My mom let me play in her clothes, wear makeup, and I had high heels from a thrift store. My mom tells me that the only reason she let me dress in her clothes is because she couldn't afford any toys, and it seemed entertaining enough and kept her from having to buy me anything, 'cause everything I wanted was in her makeup box or wardrobe.
Love is the one thing everyone is looking for, and death is the one thing everyone's running from.
Love is a universal, attractive element. And other than death, love is the one thing that binds all of humanity.
Sometimes when I'm working with RuPaul, I can't even look at her without feeling so emotional about the process I went through, and what was before the competition and what happened in my life after, and what it's done to millions of gay disenfranchised freaky kids.
Not all drag queens but certainly the ones who empowered me, are people who pushed buttons, and poked fun at society from Leigh Bowery, to Lady Bunny and Divine.
I love what news has become. It's no longer based on facts, it's based on entertainment.
Two people live within me. One's a very savvy businessperson; the other's a party girl.
A man in a dress can get away with a lot.
On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.
I come from regional, small-city drag, where if you won Miss Des Moines, Iowa, and you did something bad, or you were being a role model, your crown was taken away.
RuPaul's Drag Race' is my favorite show on television, and I've never missed an episode. With season 4, I watched it as if Sharon Needles wasn't me but was just another character.
I'm kind of a hokey-jokey, campy idiot in black lipstick, but when it comes to my music, I take it very seriously.
I've always said that punk is a time and money thing. You can only be punk if you're poor and you're young. It's for the poor, it's for the young.
Drag queens don't work well outside. We're designed for spotlights, not sunlight.
I was raised on GG Allen, Divine, Elvira and Marilyn Manson. I was always more interested in those button pushing, transgressive artists and they made a lot of good money doing it.
Gay people in general, I think, like telling secrets because we have to hide a huge secret for the first half of our lives. Why would we want to keep any more?
It seems like no one has friends in New York, they just have collaborators or co-workers.
When your hobby becomes a full-time job that pays you and the people around you, it's not fun anymore.
I love taxidermy. I collect taxidermy. I'm fascinated by the art of taxidermy. But on a more artistic level, I look at taxidermy as pulling something from the wild and taming it, and posing it in a style of your own personal pleasure that will last forever, and ever, and ever.
I did drag out of necessity. I had to do it... I had to create this other character because - because she's cheaper than therapy.
The most powerful woman I know is my mother, and she doesn't wear any make up at all.
Most drag queens dress up as super women, as an over exaggeration of the female form, because we like women, usually powerful women. I think that's why we are so over exaggerated; we are an amplification of the women who empowered us in our youth.
I'm obsessed with media and news. I could watch it all day.
Politics remind me a lot of 'RuPaul's Drag Race.' It's real but it isn't.
I'm kind of against car culture - I've always been a cyclist.
I love covers because there's just something I love about replicating someone else's music or taking rare music and introducing it to a wider or a new audience.
I went into 'RuPaul's Drag Race' saying, 'I'll never cry.' Because they make fun of every queen that cries on the show. And I did cry, and I did scream, and I did have doubt, and I did have great, victorious moments.
