“It doesn’t surprise me that people can’t see beyond my image. It’s amazing, but I can understand it. That’s what image is for. But it’s never a problem for me. It’s only a problem for them. I don’t really care. I do what I want regardless.”

My mother was a champion high-jumper. My three brothers are basketball players. We’ve all been very athletic.

I don’t collaborate. You’re born alone, you die alone, you get on stage alone.

Whatever; bling always has something to hide.

If people think I’m angry, I don’t want to burst anybody’s bubble. I like sometimes for people to be afraid of me. But it’s not really anger; it’s discipline.

I like working until the morning, so I can see the day and then I like to go to sleep and then get up before sunset. But I love the energy of the morning.

My father would have been made a bishop much earlier than he was had it not been for me and my image.

I don’t like people who hide things.

Everyone has to make their own decisions. I still believe in that. You just have to be able to accept the consequences without complaining.

I don’t think ‘pop’ should mean that you had no talent.

It’s ridiculous for a woman to say that she’s not attracted to other women. That’s completely false.

I don’t know what I’m going to be doing in two years or even in two weeks. I have to live for today.

I was skinny as a rail and had high cheekbones and a very interesting face – or so I was told.

I would have rebelled against parental authority, no matter what. When I was 15, I started painting my face and making my own clothes.

You can’t expect your children to be perfect.

Even if I sing like a robot, it is still an emotional robot.

Most performers take themselves too seriously. They forget there is a difference between the characters they play on the screen or stage and themselves, but the public doesn’t forget there is a difference. They see how silly it is if you try to be the same person all the time.

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what’s left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are.

I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn’t want to say or didn’t want to show or I was not able to find how to show.

This time, I wanted to know if I was able to create images with words, with the sound of words.

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

We use up words as we use up images. We use up everything, and that’s good, because it makes us grow.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

To be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existenceof a ghost).