PERFUME GENIUS

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.

I have a strange, not very traditional voice - I'm not Adele.

I'm really into gay stuff getting funded: having it be on TV and having a show.

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

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 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.

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'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 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 realise there are situations where I camp it up, make myself into a sort of novelty character to ease things along. Like, if I ever feel uncomfortable in a situation, I can just make myself into this funny Will-and-Grace-guest-star type of person, and maybe people will not pay attention to the deeper things going on.

I was scared of the devil starting around age nine. Before that, I was gathering every family member in the living room, slipping a shirt over my robe so the bottom hung like a skirt and performing Gloria Estefan songs with feverish intensity.

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

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.

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.

I was watching a movie called 'Perfume.' The book is really good, but the movie is really bad. My friend was making fun of it. He kept calling this obese guy a perfume genius. When I started putting my songs up on MySpace, I didn't know what was going to happen. I actually didn't put much thought into a name and just quickly used Perfume Genius.

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.'

I really never want to try to be cool.

I like Yoda. I like the Ewoks.

I have a really small and strange job history.

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.

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

There was one time I flagged every 'Brokeback Mountain' review on Netflix that was negative. I was, like, 'not helpful,' and I spent, like, an hour doing it, and I wrote a really serious review about it. It's hard for me not to get really sensitive. I don't brush things off like that very easily.

I am fierce, yes, but I'm serious about music.

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 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.