Top 50 Marianne Faithfull Quotes

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

I took drugs because we all took drugs.

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.

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

The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!

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 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.

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

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.

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.’

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

My happiness is very fragile.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t talk about my private life.

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’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.

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

I have to watch out for being lazy.

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