“I don’t love the word luxury because it feels Bougy to me.”

I never went to college and I was raised in Arkansas so there wasn’t a lot of academic language being thrown around my house.

I find inspiration everywhere. I love challenges and my favorite thing is to find something ridiculous and be like “if it’s all that I have available to me, I am gonna make it look the best that I can”.

I can take care of a house, and some people I meet, I think, ‘You don’t even know how to make a bed.

I’m on a diet. It’s very strict: all hot dogs. Just sausages, constantly. It’s working out – I’ve gained fifteen pounds!

High school wasn’t so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.

When I was a teenager I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours, bouffanting my hair like Patty Duke and trying to recreate Barbra Streisand’s flawless eyeliner, only to comb it all out and wash it all off before stepping out into the world a butchish bisexual teen.

I’m passionate about color. My best friend and I sit and look at Pantone books for fun.

To be thin and to stay really thin, sometimes some people literally do coke all the time. Some people smoke cigarettes instead of eating. That’s crazy. But that’s ‘okay’ because you look healthier.

I think it’s really cool that there are people like Adele on the cover of ‘Vogue’ and ‘Rolling Stone,’ and like I think it’s really important that people are talking about your body, because if they don’t, then you’ll never be able to break that barrier.

If you have a therapist who agrees with your every word, then your brain isn’t getting proper exercise.

I said to my teacher, ‘I can’t be a singer because I’m not pretty enough, and I’m fat.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Tell that to Nell Carter, babe.’ That changed my life forever!

We have to stop this idea that we have to be a certain shape.

For my group of friends is Lady Gaga eye-opening? No. She’s a less dangerous version of what was so cool about pop culture in the 80s. Back then it was so gay and so punk in so many ways.

My size has helped make me an amazing performer too. The cliche of the Funny Fat Friend: I absolutely was that character – I am that character… It’s a complicated bag of tools I acquired, and I’ve put them all to work onstage.

I’m constantly thinking about what I’ll do next. I never count on music being a career of longevity. I mean, longevity is key, and I hope that it lasts, but you just don’t know, because it’s not in your hands, you don’t make the decision.

I mean, if I was living to please people, I’d have never been in a band at all. I wouldn’t have anything awesome around. I’d just be bored.

Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you’re an owner. Faith is at its best when it’s that way too. It’s best lived when it’s owned.

Love is like air we can’t see it but feel it.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

We don’t feel constrained by what we did in the past.

If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.

It’s not simply what we feel, but what we feed, that determines what we do and how we live.

At least I’m not playing other people for a change. It’s a very odd place to be… I feel I’m an actress who sings a bit.

Sometimes you work with somebody you’ve never heard of because you just feel like working.