Quotes from Christine and the Queens

Because I'm experimenting so much with gender-bending and listening to everything that happens to me in terms of genderless energies, I have a hard time finding partners that can match me.

No matter what you eventually become - free, empowered - the lingering feeling of 'once an outsider, always an outsider' is very vivid for me.

Male rock stars are sexy because they desire you first. I want to be like that.

The core of all the music I love is a good bass line and a good rhythm.

The way I dress definitely helps me embody and actually change my way of behaving and feel more confident.

When the image that I built around the first album was crumbling, it was scary: the risk pays off, but the resonances of that risk are not always easy to deal with.

I love sensual women like Beyonce who are very empowering and sexy at the same time, but if it's not what you want to do then you have to say no.

I wish I could change bodies and destinies.

I've always been the one who is more enthusiastic about Christmas than my family. I regress to a child state, chanting carols.

I see theatre everywhere, actually. We're all kind of performing a version of ourselves every morning by choosing the clothes and how we appear - but the stage is so emphasising that I really feel comfortable in it.

I think 'Chris' is way more about that, about living desire as a force of chaos and about reveling in that chaos.

Most people know Serge Gainsbourg's 'Histoire de Melody Nelson' album, but what's interesting is that in the early '90s, he actually went into a dark, weird phase that French people don't really like. They consider his music from that time weak. But for me, it's the best.

Festivals are happy places, and you don't really want to enjoy them on your own.

When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.

I enjoy this confusion. Heloise? Christine? Chris? Maybe I will be called C at some point.

The character I've created, Christine, is mainly the first attempt for me to escape all the secret injunctions we have as girls all the time. Like, be pretty but be polite. Don't take too much space. All those things that didn't mean anything to me. I just decided to turn them around with my character.

I'm a huge pop music lover. I do love the immediacy, the organic fever that happens when a pop track is so infectious.

I'm not a pop star. I don't feel like one. I'm always joking that I'm actually an eight-year-old boy dreaming about being a pop star.

Music is contagious and everywhere and democratic, and that's what drew me in. I was interested in acting and being a director, but one of the things that bored me about theatre was that it was not accessible to everyone.

I always wanted to be Romeo, not Juliet. Romeo is a much cooler way to be - Juliet's just up in a balcony, waiting.

Christine, as a stage character, is just a way for me to be more daring, to be more out of the box, to be stronger and to use everything that could weigh me down like a fuel, like an energy.

I love people who go on stage and blossom like a weird flower.

When I have to take phone calls, I start to sweat and panic. Being on the phone is so weird - hearing a voice without seeing the face so you can't really know the intention behind the voice.

Christine was me wanting to break free. I was tired of being prissy and shrinking and apologising all of the time, so I created a character that could be daring for me.