Be Young, Be Dope, Be Proud.
I think America is amazing for its landscape and its history. California is beautiful, New York is beautiful, but when you're a gypsy at heart, it probably suits you to be traveling.
I'd been sick on tour for about two years with this medical anomaly that doctors couldn't figure out. That's a big part of my life: I just feel really sick a lot of the time and can't figure out why. I'd gotten these shots in Russia, where we'd just been. It was just heavy. It's just heavy performing for people who really care about you, and you don't really care that much about yourself sometimes.
Life is beautiful, but you don't have a clue.
Loving you forever can't be wrong. Even though you're not here, can't move on
My parents were lovely. They've always been supportive. When you love your child, you don't know what to do with someone who wants to do what no one else does successfully. If I had someone younger I loved, I'd be worried for them too if I didn't have guidance to give them.
God has saved me a million times, so I think He mustve enjoyed my song.
I regret trusting The Guardian. I didn't want to do an interview, but the journalist was persistent. [The writer] was masked as a fan, but was hiding sinister ambitions and angles. Maybe he's actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about.
In New York I pretty much live in diners - I order French Fries, Diet Coke floats and lots of coffee.
You do things so fast, you end up having so many different lifestyles all in one short time.
Being human is difficult. Some people make it more difficult than others. I was one of those people.
I only know how to do me, so that's just what I'm going to do.
I think that plain old intellectualism [can be] a more powerful force than the idea of the femme fatale.
People are really talkative in New York. Someone always comes up to me and says 'Hi' during the day.
I sort of do what I say and say what I do which I'm happy with because it makes my life real easy. When I was younger, people would say that I was inspired by David Lynch, so I went and watched his stuff and I was surprised. I thought it was smart, with what I was trying to do lyrically. So I started watching some of his stuff. I've never seen his movies in [their] entirety, I'm more interested in him as a person and how he came to be successful taking an alternative route, sort of a subculture icon.
I believe nothing happens by mistake. You know, the universe has a divine plan. That sounds dramatic.
[About being a teenager] Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time.
I've got a war in my mind
Be like snow - cold, but beautiful.
When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.
[About her boyfriend Barrie] We kick each others asses. We give each other input every night.
I have taken taking my music to labels for years, and everyone just thought it was creepy. They thought the images with the music were weird and verging on psychotic.
When I was younger I felt lonely... In terms of my thought processes. I had the constant feeling that I thought differently to everyone around me. So, I suppose I felt lonely for a home. I didn't know where I wanted to be, but I knew I wasn't there yet.
I'm not really interested in a ton of female musicians but there is something about Britney that compelled me - the way she sings and just the way she looks.
I don't even do anything in real life. I just sit in my studio and write, I call my friends, I watch television. I don't do anything.
If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.
I once had a dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events some of those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. But I didn't really mind, because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted, and then losing it to know what true freedom is.
I am nostalgic of an era I never knew.
With some of the bad things that come with love, there's also a lot of good. For example that connection... which I struggle to have with most people.
My songs are cinematic so they seem to reference a glamorous era or fetishize certain lifestyles, but that's not my aim.
Do you know how expensive it is to look this cheap?
When I was young I felt really overwhelmed and confused by the desire not to end up in an office, doing something I didn't believe in.
A man`s ego is just as fragile as a woman`s heart
Bad things happen everyday but you're not going to be any happier thinking about them. So I don't think about them.
Pick your role models wisely, find out what they did and do it.
Money is the anthem, of succes, so put on your mascara and your party dress
If my choice is to, I don’t know, be with a lot of men, or if I enjoy a really physical relationship, I don’t think that’s necessarily being anti-feminist. For me the argument of feminism never really should have come into the picture. Because I don’t know too much about the history of feminism, and so I’m not really a relevant person to bring into the conversation. Everything I was writing was so autobiographical, it could really only be a personal analysis.
I’ve been really blessed to have a lot of romance in my life. It’s like my last luxury.
I like a little hardcore love.
When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying.
Einstein said 'your imagination is more important than intelligence,' and I have a very, very big imagination.
My baby lives in shades of blue, blue eyes and jazz and attitude.
We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.
Growing up I was always prone to obsession, partly because of the way I am, but partly because after feeling so lonely for such a long time, when I found someone or something that I liked, I felt helplessly drawn to it. I suppose that accounts for some of the creepiness in my music.
The thing about me is, coming from an alternative music background and singing for nine years, being basically invisible, I'm so used to writing for myself - and at the end of the day, I do it because I feel like I have to. So when I'm recording or writing, I don't have other people in mind.
They judge me like a picture book, by the colors, like they forgot to read.
Love is strange, sometimes it makes you crazy, it can burn or break you down.
[Could you show us how Lana Del Rey dances in a club?] That would be illegal.
I was a different sort of child, as half the children are. I was in that category of being free-spirited.
The world needs poetry now more than ever. It's the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same.
I'm interested in the gorgeous side of life, but also familiar with the dark side too.
I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic.
I guess my strongest recurring theme is honoring love, even when it's lost.
A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I'm writing about New York.
I'm more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what's going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities.
Synchronicites . It's been said that coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous. Synchronicities are a sign of divinity. You breathe in deeply and say: 'I don't want anything. I'm going to let things happen'
I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I'm not that comfortable.
A lot of the reason my look is the way it is, is because it's really easy to put on a sundress every night if I have to perform - or just wear jeans every day and a flannel or something.
It's amazing what happens when you put your interests out into the universe and make it known what you want.
Dark and lonely. I need somebody to hold me
I believe in the person I want to become.
And I really have done everything that I said I did do. The rest is just a story that somebody else made up.
I'm like a child who belongs to nobody.
Being brave means knowing that when you fail, you don't fail forever.
It's just a relief, really. I'm scared to die, but I want to die.
I know now that it's really important to feel beautiful. There is a power to that.
My understanding of God has come from my own personal experiences. Because I was in trouble so many times in New York that if you were me, you would believe in God too.
I'm not trying to create an image or a persona. I'm just singing because that's what I know how to do.
I'm personally more struck by visual things more than musical.
What other people think of me is none of my business. Sometimes, it hurts my feelings, but I have to just keep going.
Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.
I don't really care about how good a song is, I only want them to reflect what I felt when I was writing them
The angels decided to shine on me for a little while.
Sometimes I wish I was a beautiful machine so I could resist your kiss and not cry when you're mean.
I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I've had and also the people I've had around me.
I am usually always singing about the same god damn person so I will love him forever but you know, it's all good. It's all good!
I mainly let my imagination be my reality. Fantasy is my reality.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger is so not true. You know what makes you stronger? When people treat you & your art with dignity.
I want to find someone who's really magnetic but who isn't going to do anything bad to me. It's hard.
I was, you know, a mess. I totally wanted to kill myself every day.
Nothing I ever wrote had a message. It was just my own personal experience.
Everything I do, I do it for somebody I've never met before, something in the great beyond. That's my primary relationship, really, is with something divine. I feel a connection as real with that as I've ever had with anybody on this earth.
High heels off; I'm feeling alive.
Who belonged to no one, who belonged to everyone. Who had nothing, who wanted everything.
When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That's what inspired the 'Off to the Races' melodies. That's one of the times when you're feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.
When you're an introvert like me and you've been lonely for a while, and then you find someone who understands you, you become really attached to them. It's a real release.
I still have my same babysitting job, I babysit twice a week.
People have offered me opportunities in exchange for sleeping with them. But it's not 1952 anymore.
It’s nice to be able to try and build the life you want for yourself.
When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.
My idea of a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.
I've clearer idea of how I don't want to be seen - as someone who does what everyone wants them to.
I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we're even alive at all.
I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.
Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.
Sometimes, love feels like a life or death situation. Losing true love is pretty much as bad as it gets, other than actually dying or losing good health. Most people know that. Most people can relate. It's like the end of the world.
In the end, I find my influences or inspirations where I can.
I believe in free love and that's just how I feel. It's just my experience of being with different kinds of men and being born without a preference for a certain type of person. For me, that is my story in finding love in lots of different people, and that's been the second biggest influence in my music.
I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.
I like to write about the way things used to be and paint pictures of my memories with beautiful words and melodies.
I've been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.
It's more about, when I found someone that made me feel really happy, that was so different to the way I'd felt before in my life.
Well, I mean, taking time for your art is taking time for yourself, isn't it?
I pretend I'm not hurt, I walk about the world like I'm having fun.
Dope and diamonds, dope and diamonds, that's all that I want
I lost my reputation, I forgot my truth. But I have my beauty and I have my youth.
Live fast. Die young. Be wild. Have fun.
It’s about a singer who first sneered about my allegedly not authentic style but later she stole and copied it. And now she’s acting like I am the art project and she the true super artist. My God and people actually believe her, she’s successful! I shouldn't continue ranting, it doesn’t get anywhere.
I was never successful in a noteworthy way, no one wrote about me, and I didn't have recognition. I've met a lot of musicians along the way who thought I was good, and they knew that was important to me. Having a simple career as a musician who liked music was good enough for me.
The road is long, we carry on, try to have fun in the meantime.
Sold my soul long ago, nothing left to choose. I will follow Satan. Dancing in the dark.
Every time I close my eyes, it's like a dark paradise. No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight
In the land of God's and Monsters, I was an angel looking to get f-ked hard.
It takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it, to know what true freedom is.
I wanted to be part of a high-class scene of musicians. It was half-inspired because I didn't have many friends, and I was hoping that I would meet people and fall in love and start a community around me, the way they used to do in the '60s.
When you have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to you or what your career's going to end up like and you're just really open to anything, then you don't really have anything to loose.
I just look for someone who makes me feel like life is an exciting opportunity and, you know, just like to be alive.
Don't make me sad, don't make me cry. Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don't know why.
Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I've got nothing but my aching soul?
when your happiness is someone else's happiness, that is love
I have a great appreciation for our world's history. I learn from my own mistakes, I learn from the mistakes we've made as a human race.
No matter how many people give me advice, I am going to do what my heart tells me to do
You fit me better than my favorite sweater.
I think the thing I really got from Ginsberg was that you can tell a story through kind of painting pictures with words. And when I found out that you could have a profession doing that, it was thrilling to me. It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry.
I found it hard to make friends in school, because I was a cerebral person.
