- I love looking at naked bodies, male or female, whenever possible. I think nudity is always tasteful.
- 'The truth is, I've always been wracked with self-loathing and terrible, paralysing depression" (Talking about her childhood years and the terrible self-image she had as a child)
- "Young girls now correlate the word 'sexy' with nakedness. It's practically, 'Show us your labia'. If you play that game of allowing yourself to be judged by your physicality, it will not sustain you through a long career. There's always going to be someone younger, more beautiful, more desirable. It's a temple of dust." (About the music industry)
- "Speech is my absolute lifeline and I felt like I'd lost my personality, been stripped completely of me; I felt invisible." (About having a cyst removed from her vocal chords)
- "Here am I. I'm 38. My career's probably never been better. And I've made a decision which may or may not impact on it - I refuse to hide my experience and my age, as if it's something I should be ashamed of. I'm alive. I know lots of people who've never been lucky enough to get to this stage in their life. And I'm not gonna hide it for anybody." (about being almost 40)
- I'm afraid of happy people. They're chemically unbalanced.
- "Until, I think, everyone in that school thought I was less than human. I felt ugly, weak, overwhelmed - I couldn't imagine being capable of doing anything. I certainly never thought I could be in a band. This was a dream it didn't even occur to me to dream about." (1998, Select Magazine)
- I look at today's charts, at the women who are selling the most records, getting the most column inches, and I'm terrified by how they are all controlled by a male corporate idea of what women and rebels should be. When Christina Aguilera is taken seriously as a rebellious figure, we have a huge problem.
- A lot of celebrities just want money, fame, power, fancy cars, houses all over the world and have people bow down to them. To me, that's frightful behaviour.
- A lot of people these days are not music lovers - they just want to be famous which is a very different thing to what I grew up believing in.
- I am not a sexy woman, I'm not beautiful, I'm not a sex kitten, I don't flirt with people, yet I've been tagged more of sex symbol than women who truly are and I that's solely because I don't reveal too much: people are curious.
- I couldn't feel good about myself hanging out in Armani clothes when my girlfriend can't even pay her heating bill. I'd feel foul and I'd be embarrassed.
- I'm looking at what's happened with Lana Del Rey, and I feel sympathy for her. That kind of venom is what I attracted when we first came out. Everyone called me a fake even though I'd been in bands for a decade - everybody was really on our back. We weren't "real," whatever that fucking meant.
- Selling millions of albums is a sign you've infiltrated the culture.
- We found ourselves in a fractious relationship with our record label. They had an idea of how they saw our career which wasn't in line with how we saw it ourselves. They felt a band was worthless unless they were the biggest band in the world but being the biggest band in the world wasn't an ambition we had for ourselves.
- When you're signed to a record label, you have to run all your music through them, and they decide whether they will release it or not. After a while, you just want to scream, and hand them some really obscure, weird, obtuse, unmarketable music, but then of course they'd never release it. I think taking a hiatus was our reaction against that. We wanted to free ourselves of that straitjacket. Then, of course, years passed, and you start to feel creative again, and get excited about the notion of getting into a room with people you love, and making music. That's basically what happened.
- Failure is a part of life, and without it you'll never succeed. You build your arsenal by experience, by standing back up to take another hit. I wish I had known that more in my own life. Instead, I just sat there looking at everybody else-she's this, she's that, she comes from money, she's beautiful, she's a great athlete. Eventually I did make whatever small gifts I have work for me, but I think most women feel that they are not good enough, and my point is you are.
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