"I don’t consider my own clothing to be outrageous... The truth is that people just don’t have the same references that I do. To me it’s very beautiful and it’s art, and to them it’s outrageous and crazy."

"That’s the most Warholian thing about what I do... I embrace pop culture. The very thing that everybody says is poisonous and ostentatious and shallow, it’s like my chemistry book... and I make what I believe to be art out of it."

"Grace Jones said this to me when I met her. I washed her feet, and I looked up at her and she said, "No matter what you do in your life, don’t you ever let anybody take your creative people away from you." And what my creative friends always remind me of is they say, "Only value the opinion of those that you respect. And anyone that you don’t respect, pay no mind to their opinion about you or anything else." And that’s how I live my life. If I worried about everything that everyone said, I would not be a good artist."

"You see, if I was a guy, and I was sitting here with a cigarette in my hand, grabbing my crotch and talking about how I make music because I like fast cars and fucking girls, you'd call me a rockstar. But when I do it in my music and in my videos, because I'm a female, because I make pop music, you're judgmental and you say that it is distracting... I'm just a rockstar."

"I've gone bankrupt about four times now. Every dollar I earn goes on the show."

"I operate from a place of delusion-that’s what the Fame is all about... I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be - and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth."

"You listeners, the ones who found me first are, I believe, the future of great art thinkers. Because anyone that's found me now I really think is grabbing on to the ideas that I have, more than anything. It's about the music but it's also about the story. So thank you guys for loving and reading the story and being as into it and as passionate as I am."

"In my show I announce, ‘People say Lady Gaga is a lie, and they are right. I am a lie. And every day I kill to make it true.’"

"I think that fashion and music go hand-in-hand, and they always should. It's the artist's job to create imagery that matches the music... I think they're very intertwined."

"Prejudice is a disease. So is fashion. But I will not wear prejudice."

"Children being left, it's not always like books of Charles Dickens. When you lose your parents in childhood, it's a fact of life, and, you know, human beings are extraordinary powerful survivors. My mother commit suicide. I was lucky it was not in front of me. O.K.? Which is truth, and Father was confused, and we never had any relationship, serious relationship. I never knew my father, in a way. But what? It's made me different? No, I mean. I blame for every fuckups in my life my parents? No. [Pause] I got lucky. I fell in love with dance."

"I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience. Then you arrive in the States and it is $150 to go to an opera. Ridiculous. We have so much young talent on the streets, but because everything is commercial they finally drift away from their dream of their life."

"You ask me what's happened in my life, why and how I did this and that. And I think and tell, but it's never true story, because everything is so much more complicated, and also I can't even remember how things happened. Whole process is boring. Also false, but mostly boring."

"You know, I never planned to leave. I was not extremely patriotic about Mother Russia. You know, I played their game, pretending, of course. You have to deal with, you know, party people, KGB... Horrifying."

"The minute plane set down, the minute I stepped again on Latvian ground, I realized this was never my home. My heart didn't even skip one beat."

"He’d be a ruin by now, both physically and mentally. Physically because of the bottle. . . . Mentally because of that mixture of impotence and cynicism that corrodes everyone there — the stronger you are the worse it is."

"The more injuries you get, the smarter you get."

"Most beautiful dumb girls think they are smart and get away with it, because other people, on the whole, aren't much smarter."

"I have a gift for enraging people, but if I ever bore you it will be with a knife."

"I have been taking stock of my 50 years since I left Wichita. How I have existed fills me with horror for I failed in everything. Spelling, arithmetic, writing, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend, even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried with all my heart."

"I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept it without wishing I had given it away."

"We were Midwesterners born in the Bible Belt of Anglo-Saxon farmers, who prayed in the parlor and practised incest in the barn."

"The rest of the girls wore smiles as fixed as their towering feather headdresses. I decided right then that onstage I would never smile unless I felt like it."

"I was simply playing myself, which is the hardest thing in the world to do – if you know that it’s hard. I didn’t, so it seemed easy."

"A well-dressed woman, even if her purse is painfully empty, can conquer the world."

"I was navigating, but not seeing."

"We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance."

"(Women you respect most?) Georgia O'Keeffe, Martha Graham. For reasons plain to all-among them, common to both, an inviolate independence of spirit in pursuing their arts, the wholeness of their gifts of the imagination."

"Some of you are doomed to be artists."

"Movement never lies."

"I use the words gods and goddesses principally, I think, to mean beautiful bodies — bodies that are absolute instruments. And I believe in discipline, I believe in a very definite technique. You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels — a leaf feels, a storm feels — what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech."

"To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people. Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show."

"Dancing is very like poetry. It's like poetic lyricism, sometimes, it's like the rawness of dramatic poetry, it's like the terror — or it can be like a terrible revelation of meaning. Because when you light on a word it strikes you to your heart."

"I think comedy is the most difficult thing in the world, I really do. One can always lament, you know — but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard. And for me the great tragedian should also be a great comedian."

"I don't try to tell the dancers exactly what a dance means before they do it. I can correct it and tell them what they have done after they have done it, and what it means to me. But I don't say, "Be fearful here," "Be angry here," because I think that is intrusion."

"To me, the only sin is mediocrity."

"I've always regarded eroticism as a beautiful word. I'm not ashamed to be linked to it. I would be ashamed to be linked to flamboyant sexuality; that's a part of life, but it isn't all of it."

"The erotic element is life, but doesn't have to absorb you, it doesn't have to be a naughty word. It's the love of life in many ways."

"I love words very much. I've always loved to talk, and I've always love words — the words that rest in your mouth, what words mean and how you taste them and so on. And for me the spoken word can be used almost as a gesture."

"Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery — what it all means…"

"When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it's the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography."

"I am absorbed in the magic of movement and light. Movement never lies. It is the magic of what I call the outer space of the imagination."

"The body is a sacred garment: it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honour, and with joy and with fear as well. But always, though, with blessing."

"I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of mankind — the landscape of the human soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human being can be."

"The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle."

"People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose: I was chosen to be a dancer, and, with that, you live all your life."