Lady Gaga

We are not actually equal - humanity - if we are not allowed to freely love one another.

I'm doing everything that I can, working with experts, really studying the statistics to figure out a way we can make it cool or normal to be kind and loving.

I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer and to - as my father puts it - finally have a real job.

When I wake up in the morning I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

I guess you could say it's always been my destiny to be a performer.

I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina, but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.

So there's nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who's cool hates - and then making it cool.

I'm definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I'm really excited about, is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid.

I just want to keep writing music.

Pop music will never be low brow.

'Born this Way' is about being yourself and loving who you are and being proud.

Then when I'm in these relationships with people who are also creative or creative in their own way what happens is the attraction is initially there and it's all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

I really wanted to break the mold of what modern touring is right now.

I decided to pursue music so I dropped out of school and I told my parents I didn't want any money from them. I got three jobs and I just hit the ground running.

People want to tear me down they were going to knife me anyway.

Whether I'm wearing lots of makeup or no makeup I'm always the same person inside.

To this day some of my closest friends say 'Gaga you know everything's great. You're a singer, your dreams have come true.' But still when certain things are said to you over and over again as you're growing up it stays with you and you wonder if they're true.

I want kids. I want a soccer team and I want a husband.

I work very hard but when God opens that door for you - when life opens that door for you I should say - I think it's important to be giving to return the love back.

The blurring of fantasy and reality is something that the Japanese herald in their life in their day-to-day commercialism.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

I believe that if you have revolutionary potential you must make the world a better place and use it.

I don't want to make niche-oriented music.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience it just became one.

I think what it really is is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse, it's my mind.

I hope when I'm dead I'll be considered an icon though.

Every video I'm in every magazine cover they stretch you, they make you perfect. It's not real life.

I wanted to only create a great perfume not any perfume that would sell but a great artistic one that the fans would not feel cheated by.

I was called really horrible profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people and my schoolwork suffered at one point.

I'm drawn to bad romances.

I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing, I want to be a voice with them among them.

I love Dolce & Gabbana. I love Versace. I love the crazy more eccentric stuff.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint I think I am a great performer.

I like black because it is a vacant space.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don't know how to manage it.

You shouldn't have to have money to have a luxury fragrance.

I do yoga, I do Bikram, and I run, and I eat really healthy.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says 'What kind of music do you make?' and you say 'Pop music.' You may as well have 'I'm not cool' stamped on your forehead.

I love being able to be political without any political affiliation.

I just want my family to be safe. Because I am sometimes polarizing, I fear for their safety.

In fact, my courage and my bravery at a young age was the thing I was bullied for a kind of 'Who do you think you are?'

How I love David Bowie.

What I've discovered is that in art as in music there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

You have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much.

I don't see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way - artistically.

It was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.

I want my fans to love themselves. It's almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'

When the whole world has their eyes on you if you say something that doesn't truly come from your spirit and your soul or if you wear something that doesn't come from your spirit and your soul it's an injustice to your position. And so I'm really myself every single day and I do it because I know my fans would want me to.

I'm not interested in people positioning me next to other artists.

I have to be on such a strict diet constantly.

I write music every day.

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don't live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope... It is not a reflection of all religious people.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

If you don't feel safe as a child you can't learn.

Fame is ultimately about the cycles of desire and how to do away with them or manage them well.

My mom and I are very close.

My apartment is my stage and my bedroom is my stage - they're just not stages you're allowed to see.

I don't like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I'm from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

When I say to you there is nobody like me and there never was that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.

I already am a product.

Well in order for me to be successful... In order to be a great artist - musician actor painter whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

If you only believe that you're an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out I would say that's quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

In a sense I portray myself in a very androgynous way and I love androgyny.

I'm half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

I'm very free-spirited.

I'm working on bringing the instant film camera back as part of the future.

The dieting wars have got to stop.

I'm a wandering gypsy.

I feel like if you're a really good human being you can try to find something beautiful in every single person no matter what.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

Some artists are working to buy the mansion or whatever the element of fame must bear but I spend all my money on my show.

Because the sweeter the cake the more bitter the jelly can be.

It sometimes makes people feel better about themselves, you know, to put other people down or make fun of them, or maybe make mockery of their work, and that doesn't make me feel good at all.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

I don't see myself as ever being like anybody else.

If you are not being bullied all I would say - cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well - is you know be someone that nurtures and if there's someone in your class that maybe doesn't have a lot of friends be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes, be the bigger person.

It's hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night you don't always know who to call. So I am very close to my family.

I've had grand pianos that are more expensive than like a year's worth of rent.

No matter how much you rehearse on that stage once you add 30 000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation it's pretty intense.

You think I'm going to ask these sweet 14 year olds to ask their parents to buy a $100 ticket then run around in latex and lip sync? No way.

Love is an interesting thing.

I dropped out of NYU moved out of my parent's house got my own place and survived on my own. I made music and worked my way from the bottom up.

I've been actually really very pleased to see how much awareness was raised around bullying and how deeply it affects everyone. You know you don't have to be the loser kid in high school to be bullied. Bullying and being picked on comes in so many different forms.

I don't think that women need to smell interesting.

I don't like celebrities, I don't hang out with them, I don't relate to that life.

What I've learned is that you really don't need to be a celebrity or have money or have the paparazzi following you around to be famous.

I don't care about money.

I don't want to make money, I want to make a difference.

My next baby will be my new record.

I'm perpetually lonely.

A record deal doesn't make you an artist, you make yourself an artist.

I had this dream and I really wanted to be a star. And I was almost a monster in the way that I was really fearless with my ambitions.

I want a baby from an Italian - possibly Sicilian - donor.

I think what made it difficult for people to get and still makes it difficult for people to get is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element.

Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with because it forces us to judge ourselves.

My concerts are about me being very private in public but I'm very protective.

When you're around me and really see that all I do is live and breathe for my work it's not strange it's just Gaga.

I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry.

Pop stars should not eat.

I am my own sanctuary and I can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.

I like pushing boundaries.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

I was performing in New York and my friends started to call me Gaga they said I was very theatrical and they said 'You're Gaga'.

I feel that my fans have cultivated my talent and they continue to nurture me.

I am an artist and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

I love imperfections.

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

My work as an artist is completely separate from my work as a philanthropist.

My mother always wanted to give back.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music - which I did want to be fun and I did want it to be about individuality but please also take away from it that there's no dream that's too big.

I have never had plastic surgery and there are many pop singers who have.

I don't think I could live without hair makeup and styling let alone be the performer I am. I am a glamour girl through and through. I believe in the glamorous life and I live one.

My father opened a restaurant. It's so amazing... it's so freaking delicious but I'm telling you I gain five pounds every time I go in there.

I think it's OK to be confident in yourself.

I got a job when I was 15 because my allowance was about $20 a week, which in New York was impossible. So I used to waitress across the street from where I grew up.

I was a strange loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

I don't like L.A. It's just not fun. I don't know why but I just don't get it. You have to drive to get everywhere and when it rains everybody freaks out.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to liberate them I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

I don't like talking to celebrities.

I'm not as goal obsessed as I am process obsessed.

That is what fame is isn't it? To get the world to fall in love with you.

I'm an inventor.

Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me and you call me Stefani you don't really know me at all.

I am a walking piece of art every day with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.