“Hiding, secrets, and not being able to be yourself is one of the worst things ever for a person. It gives you low self-esteem. You never get to reach that peak in your life. You should always be able to be yourself and be proud of yourself.”
― Grace Jones
“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.”
― Grace Jones
“There is some Eighties music that is just timeless. The melodies, the lyrics… I called it church. Church in club. You can shout and dance. The best of the Eighties was club church.”
― Grace Jones
“Everyone has to make their own decisions. I still believe in that. You just have to be able to accept the consequences without complaining.”
― Grace Jones
“I like conflicts. I love competition. I like discovering things for myself. It’s a childlike characteristic, actually. But that gives you a certain amount of power, and people are intimidated by that.”
― Grace Jones
“I feel feminine when I feel feminine. I feel masculine when I feel masculine. I am a role switcher.”
― Grace Jones
“I’ve changed. I’m not worried about what people think, because I think people think what they want to think anyway.”
― Grace Jones
“Use, don’t abuse.”
― Grace Jones
“I just go with the flow, I follow the yellow brick road. I don’t know where it’s going to lead me, but I follow it.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t like people who hide things. We’re not perfect, we all have things that people might not like to see, and I like to show my faults.”
― Grace Jones
“I believe in individuality, that everybody is special, and it’s up to them to find that quality and let it live.”
― Grace Jones
“I like dressing like a guy. I love it. When I was modeling I used to do pictures where I would dress up like my little brother. No makeup, and I looked like a boy.”
― Grace Jones
“I only move forwards, never backwards, darling.”
― Grace Jones
“Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.”
― Grace Jones
“You don’t do oysters and red wine together. That’s a no-no; you just don’t do that. I love a nice white wine with oysters.”
― Grace Jones
“Women and men grow up with both sexes. Our mothers and fathers mean a lot to us, so it’s just a question of finding a balance between their influences. I’ve found mine. And it tends to be more on the male side. I mean male side the way we understand it in the West.”
― Grace Jones
“In the Seventies and Eighties we all had our fun, and now and then we went really too far. But, ultimately, it required a certain amount of clear thinking, a lot of hard work and good make-up to be accepted as a freak.”
― Grace Jones
“I’m not a rock star; I’m a soft person.”
― Grace Jones
“I’m always rebelling. I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”
― Grace Jones
“I wanted to be a ‘jungle mom’, where you’re giving birth and getting up and doing things straightaway.”
― Grace Jones
“I was a go-go dancer, too. I called myself ‘Grace Mendoza’ to fool my parents.”
― Grace Jones
“For me, a diva is like the great opera singer, the great film star – out of reach, in their own world, with a real gift for invention: attention-demanding performance artists with a flamboyant, compelling sense of their own importance so special and inimitable it verges on the alien.”
― Grace Jones
“People always like to make me seem taller than I am.”
― Grace Jones
“My brother used to get beaten up all the time because he was very effeminate.”
― Grace Jones
“Music has its own depths, and I let it take me where it takes me, even if it means stripping all my clothes off.”
― Grace Jones
“You had to wear a hat to go to church. We weren’t allowed to straighten our hair. We couldn’t wear jewellery, nail polish, open backed shoes, skirts above the knee… trousers were forbidden because male apparel on a female was not godly.”
― Grace Jones
“I see myself as no color. I can play the role of a man. I can paint my face white if I want to and play the role of white. I can play a green, I can be a purple. I think I have that kind of frame and that kind of attitude where I can play an animal.”
― Grace Jones
“We’re not perfect; we all have things that people might not like to see, and I like to show my faults.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t wear jewelry, so I wear furs. I don’t have diamonds.”
― Grace Jones
“If you want me to work with you, then come with an idea. Come with music.”
― Grace Jones
“Now when I enter a carriage, it almost empties. But there’s always one brave enough to stay.”
― Grace Jones
“I like to isolate myself when I work because I end up losing my voice by doing interviews all day.”
― Grace Jones
“My mother was a champion high-jumper. My three brothers are basketball players. We’ve all been very athletic.”
― Grace Jones
“I would have rebelled against parental authority, no matter what. When I was 15, I started painting my face and making my own clothes.”
― Grace Jones
“I never thought I was going to be a singer. That was an accident.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t think ‘pop’ should mean that you had no talent.”
― Grace Jones
“I like to think of myself as a positive person. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a child.”
― Grace Jones
“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.”
― Grace Jones
“I loved all those classic figures from the ’30s and ’40s… Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth. They had such glamour and style. I loved the movies of those times too – so much attention paid to details, lights, clothing, the way the studios would develop talent.”
― Grace Jones
“When you become such a strong personality in music, it’s hard for people to accept you as a different character.”
― Grace Jones
“I came from a very strict background, and didn’t hear any Jamaican music when I was growing up.”
― Grace Jones
“My husband used to shout at my mother, ‘What is wrong with your daughter? I’m married to a man.’”
― Grace Jones
“I never do what anyone else is doing. I could walk away from music and become a farmer or do some crochet. The worst thing in life for me is to do something I’m not happy doing.”
― Grace Jones
“I’ve turned down millions of dollars to go on reality TV. It’s an absolute no-go.”
― Grace Jones
“I always thought that feminine, softer side was just too vulnerable to put out there, because then it’s like you’re opening up a door for everybody to come in, and you don’t know who’s going to come in that door.”
― Grace Jones
“Growing up in Jamaica, the Pentecostal church wasn’t that fiery thing you might think. It was very British, very proper. Hymns. No dancing. Very quiet. Very fundamental.”
― Grace Jones
“When I perform on stage I become those male bullies, those dominators from my childhood. That’s probably why it’s so scary, because they scared me.”
― Grace Jones
“When I started modelling, I’d raise my arms and it was all muscle and all the other models had nothing. Really, everybody thought I was a man. I don’t have to do much to have muscles. It’s just genetic.”
― Grace Jones
“I love women, but I’ve never had a relationship with a woman.”
― Grace Jones
“I’m not as impatient as I used to be. I used to hit people if I didn’t like what they were saying. Just lash out. ‘Bam – shut up! Hahahah!’ I was terrible.”
― Grace Jones
“One creates oneself.”
― Grace Jones
“When I was modelling, I spent half my life staring at thousands of perfect reflections. It got to a stage where I was losing all sense of reality – so after I quit modelling, I took all the mirrors out of my house.”
― Grace Jones
“I’ve had more misrepresentations than I can handle, and people have told the wickedest lies about me. A lot of them have taken their frustrations out on me, and I don’t like that because it can wound. Not necessarily me, but those around me. Journalists can be so bad.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t take the English press seriously at all because all they want is dirt… I hate them.”
― Grace Jones
“My father would have been made a bishop much earlier than he was had it not been for me and my image.”
― Grace Jones
“My dad’s family were political and he was always a theatrical creature, whereas my mum is really musical and her father was the touring pianist with Nat King Cole. My family was an explosive mixture of politics, religion and music – no wonder I turned out how I did.”
― Grace Jones
“You can’t expect your children to be perfect.”
― Grace Jones
“Rock n’ roll can get quite overwhelming. You can get caught up in the cycle.”
― Grace Jones
“I’m too vain, one of my biggest sins, but it saved me; I can see what excess does.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t collaborate. You’re born alone, you die alone, you get on stage alone.”
― Grace Jones
“I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t like people who hide things.”
― Grace Jones
“To be honest, my life is not really as way-out and myth-loaded as people like to portray it.”
― Grace Jones
“I go feminine, I go masculine. I am both, actually. I think the male side is a bit stronger in me, and I have to tone it down sometimes. I’m not like a normal woman, that’s for sure.”
― Grace Jones
“It was very painful combing my hair. My grand-uncle was a Pentecostal bishop, and he was very strict: our hair couldn’t be permed or straightened. So I just cut it all off.”
― Grace Jones
“I am an actress first, a singer second.”
― Grace Jones
“I didn’t think I had a voice at all, and I still think of myself as an interpreter of songs more than a singer. I thought it was too deep; people thought I was a man. I had a very strong Jamaican accent, too; the accent really messed me up for auditions.”
― Grace Jones
“I was skinny as a rail and had high cheekbones and a very interesting face – or so I was told.”
― Grace Jones
“I have been so copied by those people who have made fortunes that people assume I am that rich. But I did things for the excitement, the dare, the fact that it was new, not for the money. And too many times I was the first, not the beneficiary.”
― Grace Jones
“Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna. I cannot be like them, except to the extent that they are already being like me.”
― Grace Jones
“More having to do whatever anybody said you had to do. I couldn’t really do anything on my own. But as I got older and then came to America and then Grace became my name, it somehow freed me. All of a sudden, I can be this other person.”
― Grace Jones
“I am not a diva: I am a Jones. ‘Diva’ is so overused. Diva, icons, the whole thing, legends… To be a diva, what is that?”
― Grace Jones
“Normally, I stay away from politics – unless I’m going to run for president.”
― Grace Jones
“Human beings should stick together. Honestly, if I see a red-haired person with blue eyes now, I say, ‘Is your granny black?’”
― Grace Jones
“They used to call me Firefly when I was a little girl, and I always tried to figure out why I was being called a firefly. I was really black, black, black from the sun. After being in Jamaica for 13 years, my eyes were really beady and white, and my skin was really black. I must have really looked like a fly. My eyes looked like lights, like stars.”
― Grace Jones
“Mum was a high-jumper and qualified to go to the Olympics, but it got into the newspapers that she was married to my father, and the church put pressure on her to pull out of the Olympic team, saying, ‘You can’t be exposing all your legs.’ That’s how strong the influence of the church was on us all.”
― Grace Jones
“Sometimes we’d have to climb a tree and pick our own whips to be disciplined with. When you had to pick your own whip, you knew you were in for it.”
― Grace Jones
“I like to experiment, and as an actress, I always thought it’s good to be open about a lot of things.”
― Grace Jones
“There will always be a replacement coming along very soon – a newer version, a crazier version, a louder version. So if you haven’t got a long-term plan, then you are merely a passing phase, the latest trend, yesterday’s event.”
― Grace Jones
“The problem with the Dorises and the Nicki Minajes and Mileys is that they reach their goal very quickly. There is no long-term vision, and they forget that once you get into that whirlpool, then you have to fight the system that solidifies around you in order to keep being the outsider you claim you represent.”
― Grace Jones
“This is what I would say to my pupil: ‘You have become only your fame and left behind most of who you were. How are you going to deal with that? Will you lose that person forever? Have you become someone else without really knowing it? Do you always have to stay in character for people to like you? Do you know that you are in character?’.”
― Grace Jones
“Listen to my advice; I have some experience. In a way, it is me being a teacher, which is what I wanted to be. I still feel I could go into teaching. What is teaching but passing on your knowledge to those who are at the beginning? Some people are born with that gift.”
― Grace Jones
“Some people are both genders. I think you just come out the way you come out, and you have to embrace it honestly.”
― Grace Jones
“I don’t party now, and nobody really knows how to party with me anymore. So I stay in a lot. I really am a home person.”
― Grace Jones
“Religion has stayed with me even though I rebelled.”
― Grace Jones
“I had no childhood, really, so I imagined more than played, and that definitely led to my showbusiness image, the theatrics and the drama of my life.”
― Grace Jones
“I’m a man-eating machine.”
― Grace Jones
“My mum was very glamorous, an incredible seamstress. She made up those Vogue, Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent patterns they used to sell. It was church couture, darling! Because my dad was a pastor, she could get away with more than other women. Her skirts were that bit tighter.”
― Grace Jones
“It’s important that the sexes understand each other.”
― Grace Jones
“Fear is fear of fear, I think.”
― Grace Jones
“Gaga came to me, and I just could not find a soul. I come from church; maybe that has something to do with it. I like to get to the soul of a person. I just didn’t feel a soul.”
― Grace Jones
“Even though the agency kept me pretty busy, I auditioned for every play and film I could find. But they all wanted a black American sound, and I just didn’t have it. Finally, I got tired of trotting around and took myself to Paris.”
― Grace Jones
“I was born into a very religious family where everything was about setting the right example for the community and having to obey orders blindly. I felt that everyone was growing up in the world, except me. This is probably one of the reasons why I had such a rebellious attitude towards any form of authority.”
― Grace Jones
“Yelling between people in love is normal.”
― Grace Jones
“I always had to mask my emotions. I could never show that I missed my mom or my dad, especially when they moved to America. My grandparents were tough. I was not allowed to receive letters that had not been read before. Everything was controlled – everything!”
― Grace Jones
“It’s the nature of man to give and receive – to be man and woman, all in one.”
― Grace Jones
“Shock always sells. You know? But you could shock in good taste.”
― Grace Jones
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