Top 66 Perfume Genius Quotes

I’m just doing what I want. I’m not thinking, like, ‘Today I’m going to dress like a woman.’ I’m not even thinking about that. I’m just thinking, ‘I want to wear this today; I want to be this today.’

The thing is everything is good at the Cheesecake Factory. Everything’s good. It’s science-based. It’s a formula; there’s math. It’s all good!

I’m personally not a very contact-y person; I just let my phone die and don’t turn it on for a couple of days.

I like to have fun! And everything that’s good for you is not fun, and that bores me.

I’m always 20 minutes ahead of myself in my head. But being present – it’s beautiful when it happens.

When I watch alien movies, I want to be the alien. I don’t want to be the people that make first contact or anything; I just want to be that creature.

When something is heartwarming and triumphant, and not corny or preachy, it’s such a powerful thing.

I’m fairly dramatic.

I play a lot of role-playing games on the computer. And I always have.

I have a strange, not very traditional voice – I’m not Adele.

Whenever anything ‘gay’ comes along, everybody wants that thing to somehow be everything to everybody. And usually, it is too gay or not gay enough. There’s never the right amount. I think that happens a little bit in the media.

If I drink coffee, I have to turn the lights off and lay down. I can’t handle it.

I felt like an outsider, so listening to a bunch of outsiders’ music like Bjork and Patti Smith made me feel better. But at the same time, I didn’t have anyone singing specifically 100% about things I could relate to.

Taking care of myself is not instinctual for me. It feels very weird.

If I’m not writing, I can download a newer album everybody’s making a fuss about. But when I’m writing, I keep myself in my own zone – I worry about listening to new music that’ll inform me too much. I’m the kind of person who goes to another country and starts speaking in an accent after three days.

On the first two albums, I essentially began with lyrics and placed the music underneath or around the words.

iTunes is my favorite record store.

I went off at a person who threw a plastic thing at one of my shows once. After I shamed them, I realised it was a little lipstick and felt bad for days.

I get in my own way a lot. I feel a lot more confident than I… am.

One of the things that ‘Too Bright’ refers to is how there’s a lot of times where I see things that I could change that could make me more contented, but I usually just don’t make those changes because they seem new and scary. I just stay where I’m at, even if I’m miserable, because I’m familiar with it.

I’ve known that people were racist and misogynistic and homophobic since I was very little.

I started writing songs later in life because I just couldn’t commit to it before.

I feel kind of limited and locked into my body and brain – I’m not super into it all the time.

He was my biggest crush when I was 12, and it’s never really stopped. I was on BenAffleck.com a lot growing up. I don’t know why.

I don’t know if I am a role model, but I’ve had young kids write to me. I try to write songs that I wish I would have heard when I was younger. It’s kind of strange to think of yourself as a role model. That wouldn’t be a bad job.

Honestly, I just wear what makes me feel good. It becomes political when you leave the house without changing.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles – like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

I’m just very self-conscious about the way I look. I really am embarrassed of it, because I wish I wasn’t like that.

I love Twitter.

For me, piano is just where I started; I know where to go with it.

I don’t ever necessarily feel masculine or feminine. I just feel… I don’t know. Like, when I’m wearing women’s clothes, it’s not like I’m dressing like a lady, a woman; it’s just like I’m doing whatever I want.

I feel trapped in my body. I want to be like like Scarlett Johansson in ‘Lucy,’ when she unlocks everything within her – I want to do that. I want to be the alien in ‘Arrival’ – a spitty, infinite-time-loop creature.

I was really scared of the devil growing up: I was convinced I was going to be possessed.

I’m pretty sure I would have managed to over-share no matter what time period I was born in. It’s a family thing, too.

Any tragic memory I have I also think is really funny. On any given day, I can think about how horrible something is and also how ridiculous and over-the-top it is.

I do not work out regularly, but I do dance so much and jump around so much on stage, and I do it every day, so I feel like that’s my exercise.

The first record I bought was the ‘Edward Scissorhands’ soundtrack. I remember being really obsessed with the movie, and all the campiness sort of went over my head because I was so little – it’s the same with ‘Hairspray.’ But I would listen to that soundtrack a lot.

I wasn’t a hoarder, but I was on my way. I went to thrift stores and never didn’t buy something. A lot of cat figurines, needlepoint, afghans. Grandma stuff, I suppose.

I sort of trust myself as a musician to experiment more and to know when things are more effective when they’re spare and when a song can hold up to a lot of different instrumentations. So I’m more willing to go for it.

I got very serious about micro-piglets and what it would be like to own them.

My mom is always asking why can’t I make something nice? Because I’ll make paintings, say, and they’re just really bloody and angsty. So I wrote ‘Dark Parts’ because I wanted to write something nice for her.

I think all gay men are used to people saying no to them, to people not giving them choices.

To me, when something’s really funny, there’s, like, a wildness to it, and it’s very close to the wildness of something potentially tragic or gross. It’s all very close to each other when you have that extreme level of feeling.

My favorite movie is ‘Dogfight’ with River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. The ending is kind of bittersweet but so real and moving and complicated.

I saw ‘Predators.’ That was pretty good, actually.

I feel like my shows have always been a place where people can wear and be and seem however they want, and it’s a heartening event.

Usually, like, anyone that would adopt, like, ‘masc,’ period, to describe them – it’s a very phony, stereotypical masculinity.

I’ve definitely met some people that cultivated a masculinity that they taught themselves. I don’t know how they figured out how to do it, but I couldn’t.

There’s a book called ‘You’re Not a Stranger Here’ by Adam Haslett – short stories, a lot of them are about mental illness and gay people – that classic combination. But they’re really well-written, really powerful. It’s pretty good.

I’ve had people tell me that I should just be sad and not joke around on Twitter, but they don’t understand that joking and being deeply sad are very close to each other. I’ll have a horrible memory that I find hysterical one day, and the next day I’ll cry about it.

I keep making the music I do because I feel very purposeful about making things that would be helpful or quell some loneliness in people. I really needed that when I listened to music growing up and even now, so I don’t mind that sense of duty.

I don’t think I wrote my first song until I was 25. And then everything I wrote ended up becoming my first album. I put my music online, and from that, things just happened.

Music helped me, growing up: it very much felt like a companion and made me less lonely.

I feel like I’ve figured out the way that I can talk about things that are important to me and have my music and the way of performance be healing and be helpful.

I don’t feel like I make sense in the world. I don’t feel like I look right. I don’t feel like I act right or do right. It’s very frustrating to me that I just walk around with this all the time.

I like Costco. They got me to be an executive member, so I’m, like, a business class member. Somehow, I’m going to end up saving money or something. The thing is, I don’t moderate very well, so I buy things that are supposed to be for a family or last for a week, but they never do.

I don’t think I’ve actually ever had cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. I’ve had the Steak Diane. I don’t like cheesecake!

I really never want to try to be cool.

For a while, I thought I would maybe be a writer. But with music, I was such a nerd; I was really obsessive about it. The problem was I couldn’t really sing. I think one day I sang from a different part of my body, from my gut for the first time, and I was like, ‘Oh! That’s how you’re supposed to do it.’

I think the best mood for writing is a heavy feeling that’s a little bit removed from you. Sometimes I feel very self-indulgent and bratty and ungrateful, and no good music comes out of that. But sometimes I can be really sad or have an excess of feeling yet somehow be able to see the big picture more.

Our house was cluttered with little charms, thoughtfully placed. There were all kinds of little things going on. Like, my mom made a lampshade out of a picture of our family, but if you look closely, there’s a baby Jesus that she cut up and put just above all of us.