As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.
I started with golf because I saw my brothers play, I was always watching them. It was my life. Growing up, we always played competitions like chipping, hitting.
'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.
I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.
Standing at a Christian music festival in Asbury, Ky., in the spring of 1978, I gave my life to Jesus Christ, and that's changed everything.
Christine and the Queens is born out of a particular moment in my life where I was quite low.
The loneliest ebb of my life came on that Christmas eve, only one day after my arrival in New York. The abyss of loneliness. I ate a solitary dinner in a small cafe, and the very food tasted bitter with my unshed tears. One doesn't dare cry in America. It is unmanly here.
I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.
Age is a chronological number. That's all. There is plenty of time for my life afterwards. I'm still a young woman.
Rock and roll came into my life when I was about 12, 13, when Little Richard and Chuck Berry had just started hitting the shores of England.
I've done jiujitsu a huge chunk of my life, and I try to spend a lot of time educating people on the nuances, the subtleness of the ground game. It's a big part of mixed martial arts.
I try and live my life in bite-size chunks.
I gathered that those two Big-shot Boys, Joe + Fletcher, just was afraid to let me sing, thinking maybe I'd sort of ruin their reputations with their musical public. They not knowing that I had been singing all of my life. In churches, etc. I had one of the finest All Boys Quartets that ever walked the streets of New Orleans.
Churchill strikes a note in my life because my father worked on Mulberry Harbour, which was the code name for the temporary concrete harbours which were towed across the Channel to make the D-day landings in France possible.
I was fresh off the boat from Romania, and one of my clients was the agent to all of the '90s supermodels: Gail Elliott, Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford. I had no idea who these girls were! They were so gorgeous, absolutely the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life.
I've always known that I'll have a career for the rest of my life because they'll always make movies about men, and men need women in their lives. But, when it comes to telling a woman's story, they're complex, circular, and not genre-driven.
I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.
The one thing I do have is good ears. I don't mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.
