Julia Restoin Roitfeld Quotes

Punk allowed women to stop looking feminine. Oh, the relief.

Music was a way of rebelling against the whole rah-rah high school thing.

I went through a rebellious phase, and was super into doing crazy hair things. I did only wear black for my junior year of high school. I was one of those kids.

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am'.

In the Seventies and Eighties we all had our fun, and now and then we went really too far. But, ultimately, it required a certain amount of clear thinking, a lot of hard work and good make-up to be accepted as a freak.

I dyed my hair pink when I was fifteen.

You ready? I have gold teeth, I have braids, I'm wearing Rick Owens moon boots, I have rips in my denim, a biker vest, I love artsy girls, my favourite artists are Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. I'm obsessed with being different.

Im not your biggest girly girl.

Telling everyone I wanted to go into forensic anthropology was my form of rebellion.

Like most kids, you don't want to do what your folks want you to do. You've got your own thing.

They are called 'Emos' now, and before that they were 'Goths.' They didn't have a name for it when I was one, but I was that black-wearing teenager and yes, I wore a little eyeliner.

I had begun to abandon bourgeois style of dress. The modern hippies are no pioneers at marking themselves out by unusual apparel …

I thought I was a hippie, bro. I wore Birkenstocks every day. I went to a Christian high school, so I was pretty funky. The teachers didn't give me a hard time, though, even though I was totally way out of line in terms of my dress code.

I think every girl has a little bit of rebellion inside. It's always fun to not follow every trend and not be the perfect good girl. It's edgy to be a little rebellious.

I went through this rebel period where I didn't want to dress up.

I will always consider myself a punk because of those experiences in high school. It will always be a part of me.

I have a natural tendency to resist conformity.

'Hedwig' was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn't do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy... You know, combine them all in a thing that's supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.

I turned to punk because I didn't fit in anywhere else.

I remember being really young - being 13 or 14 - when I first was really excited about punk rock as an idea, and I was like, 'Don't ever not be punk. Don't ever not be punk.' Telling that to myself, I guess it was like self-defense against the scary world around me.

It's like our little thing: you can take the girl out of the punk, but you can't take the punk out of the girl.

He knew her now. She was the weird girl in the class above him, who dyed her hair pink and always wore a lot of pentragrams and crystals. Right now she was also wearing giant chandelier earings and a violent pink T-Shirt that bore the words ROMEO AND JULIET WOULDN'T HAVE LASTED.

He doesn’t pretend,” the punk pixie said. He nodded toward Doyle. “Nice rings. You got anything else pierced?” “Yes,” Doyle said. The boy smiled, making the rings in the edge of his nose and his bottom lip curl cheerfully with it. “Me too,” he said.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

What makes a girl a girl? What makes a guy a guy? Do you have to be what they want you to be? Or do you stop and listen to that voice inside you? I know who I am. I'm Petra West. And I'm a girl. You want me to sleep somewhere else, fine. Whatever. But I'm not going to pretend to be somebody I'm not. I've done enough of that.