Top 50 Perfume Genius Quotes

I really never want to try to be cool.

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.

When I started to allow myself to not be locked into wearing men’s clothes, things kind of opened up. It feels very kind to drape yourself in something that feels special.

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

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

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

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 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.

When I first started making music, I wrote the lyrics first, but now, because the music has got kind of wilder, I’ve flipped it.

I wanna be bad sometimes – I wanna rip everything apart, -but it comes on less and less. Doing all this music stuff is very good for it.

I like Yoda. I like the Ewoks.

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.’

Sometimes I’m not into being a human.

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

iTunes is my favorite record store.

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

I am a shy person.

I don’t think art matters as much as keeping people safe.

I don’t know if I could write a pop song without at least a little touch of bite in it, and it’s usually not a bite that most people would want to sing.

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.

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 think people have a hard time dealing with a bunch of things at once. They can’t have something be disturbing and funny at the same time. They can’t have that kind of combination. Which is weird to me because I feel complicated about most things.

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.

My mom is not religious, but she’s a very spiritual, magical kind of lady. One time, when I was younger, my mom said she was a witch and that my grandmother was also a witch. It was late at night, and she was really sleepy, but I took it very seriously because I always wanted to go to Hogwarts.

It used to be enough for me to get on stage and sing. I kind of crave the performance part now. I write knowing it’s going to happen, which I didn’t do before.

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 was a bad student. My teachers gave up trying to teach me how to read music.

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 think people come to my music just to feel less lonely.

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 think if you know one direction, then you can feel the other one. I don’t think you can be truly, insanely joyous if you haven‘t ever felt the flip side of it.

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

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

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.

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’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.

I have ended up on so many weird Men’s Rights Twitter accounts filled with weird anime. I don’t know. It’s so bizarre to me that people can think that way, and so I feel like I can decode them or figure it out. But you can end up so grossed out.

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 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.

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.

It took me a long time to not think of the universe as a judgmental debit-credit system. I haven’t completely shaken it, but I no longer think that I am overdrawn with God. Grace is not something you earn; its always there. I find this idea a lot more fun.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I originally thought I’d grow up to be a woman. I didn’t question that when I was little.

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