Perfume Genius

“I was watching a movie called 'Perfume.' The book is really good, but the movie is really bad. My friend was making fun of it. He kept calling this obese guy a perfume genius. When I started putting my songs up on MySpace, I didn't know what was going to happen. I actually didn't put much thought into a name and just quickly used Perfume Genius.”

“I saw 'Predators.' That was pretty good, actually.”

“If I drink coffee, I have to turn the lights off and lay down. I can't handle it.”

“When I watch alien movies, I want to be the alien. I don't want to be the people that make first contact or anything; I just want to be that creature.”

“My favorite movie is 'Dogfight' with River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. The ending is kind of bittersweet but so real and moving and complicated.”

“One of the things that 'Too Bright' refers to is how there's a lot of times where I see things that I could change that could make me more contented, but I usually just don't make those changes because they seem new and scary. I just stay where I'm at, even if I'm miserable, because I'm familiar with it.”

“I've had people tell me that I should just be sad and not joke around on Twitter, but they don't understand that joking and being deeply sad are very close to each other. I'll have a horrible memory that I find hysterical one day, and the next day I'll cry about it.”

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

“I like Feist's music because it's really smart, but it's really free and soulful at the same time. Sometimes you only get one or the other.”

“Whenever anything 'gay' comes along, everybody wants that thing to somehow be everything to everybody. And usually, it is too gay or not gay enough. There's never the right amount. I think that happens a little bit in the media.”

“Good catsuits should have multiple zippers; they'll have a top and a bottom one.”

“Music helped me, growing up: it very much felt like a companion and made me less lonely.”

“On the first two albums, I essentially began with lyrics and placed the music underneath or around the words.”

“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.”

“I think it's fun to be superstitious. There's a drama in being superstitious. I'm like that in general. I have friends who don't believe in love or just think it's a chemical thing, and they don't believe in magic. I enjoy believing in all that stuff. It makes things seem more important than they are, like there's more to it.”

“I realise there are situations where I camp it up, make myself into a sort of novelty character to ease things along. Like, if I ever feel uncomfortable in a situation, I can just make myself into this funny Will-and-Grace-guest-star type of person, and maybe people will not pay attention to the deeper things going on.”

“I really never want to try to be cool.”

“Honestly, I just wear what makes me feel good. It becomes political when you leave the house without changing.”

“For a while, I thought I would maybe be a writer. But with music, I was such a nerd; I was really obsessive about it. The problem was I couldn't really sing. I think one day I sang from a different part of my body, from my gut for the first time, and I was like, 'Oh! That's how you're supposed to do it.'”

“I like to have fun! And everything that's good for you is not fun, and that bores me.”