Perfume Genius

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.

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Hymns have always sounded like sung spells to me. I never felt included in the magic of the God songs I heard growing up - I knew I was going to hell before anyone ever told me that I was. People found comfort in this all-knowing source, but I felt frightened and found out. I developed some weird and very dramatic complexes.

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When something is heartwarming and triumphant, and not corny or preachy, it's such a powerful thing.

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I think the best mood for writing is a heavy feeling that's a little bit removed from you. Sometimes I feel very self-indulgent and bratty and ungrateful, and no good music comes out of that. But sometimes I can be really sad or have an excess of feeling yet somehow be able to see the big picture more.

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There's a book called 'You're Not a Stranger Here' by Adam Haslett - short stories, a lot of them are about mental illness and gay people - that classic combination. But they're really well-written, really powerful. It's pretty good.

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To me, when something's really funny, there's, like, a wildness to it, and it's very close to the wildness of something potentially tragic or gross. It's all very close to each other when you have that extreme level of feeling.

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I like Yoda. I like the Ewoks.

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Quotes by Perfume Genius