Lady Gaga

My fashion is about the urban woman in the year 3000. I think about obscure, weird things and try to create a world around them.

It’s not that I’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality.

I am the excuse to explore your identity. To be exactly who you are and to feel unafraid. To not judge yourself, to not hate yourself.

People ask me why I wear veils. I reply, I am mourning. Mourning what? Well I figure something shitty must be going on somewhere.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, 'What kind of music do you make?', and you say, 'Pop music.' You may as well have 'I'm not cool' stamped on your forehead.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope. It is not a reflection of all religious people.

Well, in order for me to be successful... In order to be a great artist - musician, actor, painter, whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

I decided to pursue music, so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn't want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music - which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there's no dream that's too big.

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way, and I love androgyny.

I feel that my fans have cultivated my talent and they continue to nurture me.

No matter how much you rehearse on that stage, once you add 30,000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation, it's pretty intense.

It was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.

I believe that if you have revolutionary potential, you must make the world a better place.

Every video I'm in, every magazine cover, they stretch you; they make you perfect. It's not real life.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.