A biography for Christine and the Queenshasn’t been written yet.
“Christine was me wanting to break free. I was tired of being prissy and shrinking and apologising all of the time, so I created a character that could be daring for me.”
“I'm kind of obsessed with Bruce Springsteen - the T-shirt and jeans look for me is appealing. Prince was great as well. He designed all of his outfits himself and looked exactly how he wanted to look. He was in complete control of his image.”
“I love when I dive into lyrics that give me human complexity and intricate narrative.”
“Gendered performance is just constant theater.”
“I remember growing up and feeling all the time not pretty enough, too rude, too loud, taking too much space because precisely I wanted to maybe be bossy and loud and unapologetic and not really smooth all the time, and those were not really qualities that were valued for me.”
“Most people know Serge Gainsbourg's 'Histoire de Melody Nelson' album, but what's interesting is that in the early '90s, he actually went into a dark, weird phase that French people don't really like. They consider his music from that time weak. But for me, it's the best.”
“You have to work with your body when you dance; you can't shy away from your physicality. For me, it's really linked to an incandescent way of accepting yourself and projecting. The dancing was at the core from the beginning.”
“I trust people who look like animals.”
“In real life, I feel tiny and quite embarrassed all the time. But when people come up to me in France and want to talk to Christine, it's okay. It's cool. Because they're really talking about themselves, their own Christines.”
“Every masculine hero narrative I could find I wanted to steal for myself and twist to my size.”
“The gender question has always obsessed me.”
“I love trying to match a really hard expectation.”
“There's a lack of ambition in politics in terms of what we expect from the government, what it means to have a state.”
“No matter what you eventually become - free, empowered - the lingering feeling of 'once an outsider, always an outsider' is very vivid for me.”
“For some people, it's impossible to escape binaries.”
“Tapping into a more masculine, macho culture, I got in touch with my femininity, but differently. Macho culture is also pride of the body and showing it off - a relationship to theatricality, to construction. It's about owning your narrative again.”
“I use Twitter to be my best self: fun, dateable. I don't get paranoid with Twitter, only in real life. I write so I feel comfortable, not speaking.”
“I'm going to redefine what it means to be sexy, and it's going to be creepy as hell. Because I could never do the 'sexy' way of being sexy.”
“I'm a huge pop music lover. I do love the immediacy, the organic fever that happens when a pop track is so infectious.”
“I always wanted to be Romeo, not Juliet. Romeo is a much cooler way to be - Juliet's just up in a balcony, waiting.”