Quotes from Marianne Faithfull

The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.

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 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.

The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.

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.

I've learnt to accept what has happened to my voice, I suppose, but I do wish it didn't sound quite so rough.

I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.

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.

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

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

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.

It has been an extraordinary experience and, in many ways, extremely positive.

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

France has been very good for me. It has given me a very worldly-cool attitude.

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.'

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 shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.

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 focus on the individual and not seeing this great big monster, 'the press.'

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.

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.

I think you have to really, really want to be a film star.

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'm a Capricorn, and they flower late.