“At the end of the day, you won’t be happy until you love yourself.”

Well my music was different in high school; I was singing about love—you know, things I don’t care about anymore.

My fashion is part of who I am, and though I was not born with these clothes on, I was born this way.

Art perpetuates beauty. Beauty is a symptom of the force that is nature. You are a force of nature, I love you.

Glam culture is ultimately rooted in obsession, and those of us who are truly devoted and loyal to the lifestyle of glamour are masters of its history. Or, to put it more elegantly, we are librarians.

This is who the fuck I am.

I’m just a holy fool

I’m a free bitch baby.

It’s cooler to be strong.

I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much.

They can’t scare me, if I scare them first.

Do you know the feeling, when your heart is so hurt, that you could feel the blood dripping?

The Monster Ball is by nature a protest: A youth church experience to speak out and celebrate against all forms of discrimination + prejudice.

I remember watching the mascara tears flood the ivories and I thought, It’s OK to be sad. I’ve been trained to love my darkness.

Cause it’s a hard life, with love in the world. and i’m a hard girl, loving me is like chewing on pearls.

I want you to walk out of here tonight not loving me more, but loving yourselves more.

It’s hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don’t always know who to call.

I always try to write a song to work things out with myself and I want to do it with a little punchline at the end, because I never want to remember anything bad in my life.

I watch everybody every night, from sitting down to being on their feet at the end, and I feel a sense of reinvention, of caring, presenting these songs in their purest form.

I think you fall out of love with theater while you’re doing your eighth show of your eighteenth week and your body is saying, “Please make this end.”

When you wrestle with a pig, he has fun, and you just end up dirty.

Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

God’s words trump all opinions, including mine, and in the end, I believe God’s words lead to life.

I’m holding on so tightly to the promise that if nothing lasts forever, someday, this sadness will end too.

Every day we keep telling the same stories. Over and over. We forget that our endings can be different. So can the plot. I think it’s time for some surprise endings.