Marianne Faithfull
Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Death
France has been very good for me. It has given me a very worldly-cool attitude.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Attitude
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 think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.
I'm alive today, I'm well, I'm working, I'm still creative. What more can I say, really?
I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.
The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.
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 a Capricorn, and they flower late.
Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!
I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.
I'm having a great life, and I want to go on having one.
I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.
The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.
The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.
I think I'm really powerful. They'll smash me, probably.
I took drugs because we all took drugs.
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.
Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.
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 shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.
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.
The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.
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.
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.
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'd love to play a musician in a film.
I am not frightened of much, but I wouldn't like to get ill.
I have to watch out for being lazy.
Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.
I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.
I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish people didn't just think of me in the '60s. I'm not any era.
I focus on the individual and not seeing this great big monster, 'the press.'
I've done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go.
I do have a strong sense of God. It's impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.
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.'
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 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.
I'm glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.
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.
Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.