Marianne Faithfull Quotations

Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.

When you are 18, 19, 20, you're used to being photographed all the time, in a certain way. So, the narcissism becomes almost out of control. And the way that young women are photographed, they become addicted to this feedback of the image.

Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!

I want to see my grandchildren grow up. I want to be there for my friends. I want to be able to love the person in my life. I want to work. I want to do something I've never done, which is save money. I've never bought anything. I have nothing.

I'm having a great life, and I want to go on having one.

I know for a fact that Heaven and Hell are here on Earth.

All I can say is I've been lucky with my body. Well done, little body. I praise it and say, 'You're very good.'

If I let myself sink into depression, I won't be able to get out. And then I'll be awfully unhappy. I just have to turn my face to the light and walk on. And trust that things will be all right.

I think it's a great shame that America stopped being a republic and became an empire.

I'm sick of being self-referential. I don't want to do any more songs that can be accused of being personal.

I have to watch out for being lazy.

I was anorexic in the '60s and '70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now.

I took drugs because we all took drugs.

I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.

To be diagnosed with cancer was a frightening thing, and my first reaction was sheer panic, but I was really fortunate that the cancer was caught at such an early stage that I didn't need chemo or radiotherapy. But I know that cancer is a chronic condition, and once you've had it, you're on the list, because it can come back.

I live a very nice life. I have a wonderful time. But it's not lived drawing on a full level. I'm relaxed, cool, and enjoying it.

I think I'm really powerful. They'll smash me, probably.

I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.

The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.

I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.

Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.

The only time I ever really consider retiring is when I get fed up with the press. Which is often.

France has been very good for me. It has given me a very worldly-cool attitude.

Lovers can do what they like to me - my head is cool.

I'd love to play a musician in a film.

I'm not sure yet what my higher mission is, but I have a feeling it might be great. Before, I thought my mission was death, but now my mission is life.

I don't like the compression on compact discs. It's lacking in air, and it's lacking in majesty.

The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.

I never like photos of myself in the beginning. I live with them for three months, put them in a drawer, take them out and look again. I hate the way I look, but of course it's really not that bad.

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.

The equipment you've got really dictates what you're going to do. When I started touring, there were no monitors, so I had to take the sound from the hall, and of course it was on a delay, so I would sing, and then I would hear it back, but later. It was very weird.

There are so many myths out there about Marianne Faithfull, I had to, um, detach. But I can turn it on because Marianne Faithfull is really an attitude, you know.

Never apologize, never explain - didn't we always say that? Well, I haven't and I don't.

I do sometimes think I could have done without the drugs actually; that was a waste of time, and a huge risk. But then again, there's nothing I can change, so in a way regret is pointless.

It has been an extraordinary experience and, in many ways, extremely positive.

Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I've had lots of shocks because it's as though I don't learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.

I'm a Capricorn, and they flower late.

The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.

Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.

I am not frightened of much, but I wouldn't like to get ill.

I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.

I love the Stones, but I've gone to a lot of gigs.

I never saw myself as beautiful. I can look back and see it now, but then? Never.

I once asked my father what he wanted me to be. To my horror, he said, 'sociologist.'

I serve black tea, which I call Froggy tea. And I have green teas and all sorts of nice teas. I'm serving tea all the time.

The food that's never let me down in life is porridge, especially with milk and maple syrup, which is delicious. Paris isn't a porridge place, but I can buy it in London when I'm there and bring it back with me.

Of course I have regrets; I'm not stupid.

Well, I really didn't enjoy some of the movies I did when I was young.

There is a land that I can go to When I have time to rest. All the people I love are there And those who love me best.

I've learnt to accept what has happened to my voice, I suppose, but I do wish it didn't sound quite so rough.

I've got a lot of little compulsive problems, and I've thought about it a lot. And one of the things I ask myself is, 'What are the things I can do that won't hurt me and will help me?' The first answer is work.

For some people, marriage may be very groovy. For me, it really isn't. I don't think it really is for most people anyway. Most people are not very happy.

My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they'd pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting.

I've got to where I've always wanted to be. I just feel more myself, and I've learned not to care what other people think. It's happened slowly, very slowly. But I did it.

I thought I wanted to go to drama school or university, and that would have been a completely different life. But what got me was the sound, and hearing it. Hearing everything so loud, I loved that back in the studio. I loved that from the very beginning.

When you lose your reputation at 19, you lose everything.

Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.

I get all dressed up with that Marianne Faithfull face, and the next thing I know, I'm blurting out things that I shouldn't, trying to get attention when, really, I've got everybody's attention already.

I'm glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.

Relationships have a nasty habit of reversing themselves; whatever has been done to you in a previous involvement you'll do to the next person you're involved with, if you get half a chance.

The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.

When I found out my mother wanted me to marry a rich man, I instantly didn't want any rich man.

I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

I'm alive today, I'm well, I'm working, I'm still creative. What more can I say, really?

I've done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go.

I think you have to really, really want to be a film star.

I've got quite a good brain and all that, which I've never had to use in singing at all.

I wish people didn't just think of me in the '60s. I'm not any era.

I don't talk about my private life.

I focus on the individual and not seeing this great big monster, 'the press.'

I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.

I do take care of myself; I get my nails done, and I have a skin doctor, but that's it. I'm clean and groomed.

I do have a strong sense of God. It's impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.

I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.

I haven't got purity, and I don't think I ever did. I have always been, even as a child, a very decadent little person.

All I have to do is what's right for me.

Feminism is the best thing to come out of the '60's.

I'm interested in time, fame, death, beauty, truth, all those things.

I've made a contribution to my time and my generation through being myself, not through what I shared with the Rolling Stones. It's very bad for me and very dangerous to see myself as someone who had an influence on this song or that song. It immediately puts me in the position where my worth is dependent on how much of my soul I shared with Mick Jagger, and it's just not valid. You can use the gossip you've heard. You're not getting it from me.

I was told that I had very likely been clinically depressed for a long, long time, probably since I was 15, or even 14. It explained, to me at least, a lot of my behaviour over the years.

I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

Working with David Bowie was very interesting, but I couldn't surrender to it. I should have let him produce a record for me, but I'm very perverse in some ways. He's brilliant, but the entourage were rather daunting.

My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can't be done.