“Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I took drugs because we all took drugs.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!”
― Marianne Faithfull
“My happiness is very fragile.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’m a Capricorn, and they flower late.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’m alive today, I’m well, I’m working, I’m still creative. What more can I say, really?”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’ve learnt to accept what has happened to my voice, I suppose, but I do wish it didn’t sound quite so rough.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“When I found out my mother wanted me to marry a rich man, I instantly didn’t want any rich man.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― 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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I never trusted anybody at all. I don’t know why it was so hard, I just didn’t.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I think I’m really powerful. They’ll smash me, probably.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin’s.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing ‘Tosca’.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’d love to play a musician in a film.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I am not frightened of much, but I wouldn’t like to get ill.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I have to watch out for being lazy.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’ve simplified much more in my writing. I say what I’ve got to say, not in metaphor.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I wish people didn’t just think of me in the ’60s. I’m not any era.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I focus on the individual and not seeing this great big monster, ‘the press.’”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’ve done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I do have a strong sense of God. It’s impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’m having a great life, and I want to go on having one.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I know for a fact that Heaven and Hell are here on Earth.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.’”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’m glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“France has been very good for me. It has given me a very worldly-cool attitude.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“The only time I ever really consider retiring is when I get fed up with the press. Which is often.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“When you lose your reputation at 19, you lose everything.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’ve got quite a good brain and all that, which I’ve never had to use in singing at all.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“Of course I have regrets; I’m not stupid.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I don’t talk about my private life.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I think it’s a great shame that America stopped being a republic and became an empire.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’m interested in time, fame, death, beauty, truth, all those things.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I never saw myself as beautiful. I can look back and see it now, but then? Never.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“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.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I’m sick of being self-referential. I don’t want to do any more songs that can be accused of being personal.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“All I have to do is what’s right for me.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I once asked my father what he wanted me to be. To my horror, he said, ‘sociologist.’”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I love the Stones, but I’ve gone to a lot of gigs.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“I think you have to really, really want to be a film star.”
― Marianne Faithfull
“Well, I really didn’t enjoy some of the movies I did when I was young.”
― Marianne Faithfull
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