"I believe in peace, bitch."
"I'm not a habit, I'm a lifestyle. I will not be a habit for a man. Ever."
"There are a lot of hidden nerds. I'm aware of the exciting man in Trent The Nine Inch, but I can see the nerd in him, too. People who become the front runners often used to be outcasts or loners."
"Um, don't get me wrong because I love boys, it's just that sometimes we don't need you."
"Just because I can't write songs sometimes doesn't mean that creative force isn't going. It's cheating on me. It's with Jewel."
"There are only ten ideas under the sun. What makes the difference is how you spice them."
"My father wanted me to have a doctorate in music - but I told him that Warner Brothers doesn't give a shit whether you have a degree or not."
"So I'm in Virginia, and I had crabs...I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland!"
"I'm a winter girl; I like coming out when things are desolate and everybody's ready to slit their wrists."
"You can only be you. A lot of times it's never enough for people."
"I'm not sane."
"I've never played the guitar, except throwing it against the wall cause it was pissed off I couldn't play it."
"Once you get to know sad...she's got some sweet little dresses, you know?"
"Truly, I was a sweetheart when I was little, like the Honeysuckle Faery. Sweet-pea. But sweet-peas are not popular after second grade. Sweet-peas become nerds really fast."
"It doesn't matter where I am as long as there is a fat Italian cook near by."
"I really enjoy having a giggle with a friend, but then someone crosses my line, then I don't really take it lightly. Some guy flipped me off recently in L.A. and I started chasing this group of Mexican guys down the road. I sometimes forget I'm not 7'2" and a Viking."
"I had a strange incident with a girl when I was eight. It was a bit violent, a bit sexual. She was a little older than me. She held me down on the bathroom floor, made me take my clothes off and fell on top of me. There are women now in my life I love and am in love with, but it hasn't got physical. I experienced it at such a young age, when I wasn't ready. A boundary was crossed. And maybe I drew a boundary, consciously."
"Im the queen of the nerds."
"When nothing makes sense, music seems to come and bring me a margarita and sit down with me."
"Usually they sprinkle a few drops of water on your head; in my case they held my head under for thirteen fucking years."
"I've been a musician before I was a human."
"You don't have to justify everything. Being pissed off is just absolutely okay."
"Men have periods too, they just don't bleed..."
"Oh, I laugh my head off when some woman calls me a shivering waif in the forest. I'm like OK, sister, you get raped and get ready to get cut up, and then write about it and sing it. And you have the balls to call me a waif shivering in the forest. That to me is a lizard running around with a pussy. It's not a woman to me. She ruined her rights as a woman."
"There is a level of the vampire in me, which is OK."
"Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about."
"It hurts me when a woman doesn't come through for me, more than a man.
"I'm a grown woman. I've earned my experiences, my scars."
"Where I come from, a cockroach is a roach, and a cockerel is a rooster because they can't bring themselves to say cock. Some of my lyrics upset my father."
"What is an angel but a ghost in drag?"
"The rebellion is not about what clothes you are wearing or whether you turn your back to the audience - it's not about shocking for the shock's sake. It's not about singing Smack My Bitch Up and pretending to be hard. All you do is to get your name on K-Mart's black list. It easy, and boring. So Prodigy, if you want to be hard, go to an abortion clinic and try to help those girls who have had an abortion in a front of 20 shotguns. Try to be rough and don't tell how you beat up your girlfriends, if you got the balls to do that."
"I don't see myself as weird, I just see myself as honest."
"I was in love with this boy when I was five years old and I knew we could really make it work. I was trying to convince him and he took this hammer and hit me with it really hard."
"There wouldn't be a lot of aubsers out there either, if the victims weren't giving them the whip."
"Lucifer understands love better than anybody. You know he's done a mean tango with Greta Garbo a few times."
"I'm begining to accept and love the parts of me, of women that I was trained to hate all my life. Particualrlly the bad girl I can still be."
"I have a love for shoes. I collect them. Race cars, paintings; those aren't my thing. I just hang shoes on the wall. They're architecture, you know?"
"My concept of the creator isn't male, or just female. Just is the key word here. It's an energy. It's a force that doesn't exclude any kind of gender. I think it's so beyond gender."
"My dad likes my success. He enjoys it for a lot of reasons. Yes, he's proud of me and so is my mom, and I think he likes that I stir it up because he has questioned a lot of the things that he preached about for so many years."
"People can be so vicious toward the imaginary world and it saddens me. You kill a lot of little people's dreams that way. You're no different from Hitler, as far as I'm concerned."
"Losing my baby was a very confrontational experience with the Christian God. In that moment, I really understood that no deity was on my altar anymore."
"Even if you don't read history or you aren't interested in anything that happened before the '60s, there are reasons why we think the way we do. There are reasons why people are going crazy right now."
"And if God did send his 'only son,' which is a joke 'only son,' it's like so he picks a certain race and a certain kind of color to be his only son and yet created all of us. No, that's not gonna happen. That's how the story goes but I don't believe the story."
"I've been called 'The Queen of Cryptic' and I don't think I write like that at all...it makes total sense to me."
"...I would find myself either the lovey-doveyest-woviest sweet pea, or a mad-woman."
"I was very influenced by these wonderful gay men who gave me the confidence to dress up, and taught me how to put on make-up, and gave me the courage on how to kiss a boy...They taught me how to become a young woman. They taught me about tenderness."
"I believe in eating. I think women especially have this fear of eating, and I think there is a whole euphoric plane you can rise to when you have a good meal. You sit down and with every bite you honestly just say thank you."
"You can't change what happened. And nobody's asking you to forgive. But you can't associate all men with violence."
"Why be afraid of these cuddly, soft, adorable things? For a minute, I thought they were communicating with me." (Tori on the rats in her "God" video)
"I have good days. Like if I get really good coffee ice cream with just the right amount of chocolate syrup."
"Yes I do have a mission. To expose the dark side of Christianity."
"I'm an acquired taste -- I'm anchovies, and not everybody wants those hairy little things. If I was potato chips, I could go a lot more places, but I'm not."
"I want to torture the people who don't understand the world of faeries. Sometimes I want to grab these bitches by the hair and take them to the world of faerie and say, 'Would you repeat that?'"
"A lot of people see themselves as victims, even when you have to stand in line for ice cream."
"My mother wanted me to clean my room and all I wanted to do was play piano."
"The last thing I want to be known as is 'The Girl Who Got Raped'. The big turn around you make in your head is from victim to survivor."
"It's so difficult to be critical of children because they need to discover themselves. We're always telling them, "No, the tree has green leaves!"
"I was a rebel for such a long time...to the point where I put on these sexual shows for the sake of shock value. I'm tired of being a rebel. Now I just want to be me."
"When things get really empty for me, empty in my outer life, in my inner life, the music world, the songs come across galaxies to find me."
"I think I had a pretty average childhood. I wasn't stolen and raised by gypsies, I wasn't sexually abused. I had loving parents. You can't really say my parents put me in a cage with a parakeet. We feel that because nothing dramatic happened that we have no right to look back at our past. But things come up that push my buttons."
"Do you know what it's like to be a girl and have blood running down your legs and think that you're dying, just because no one's told you that's what happens? It's horrible."
"An angel's face is tricky to wear constantly."
"Mess with me and you will not survive."
"I don't play the piano, the piano plays me."
"If you look at rock culture, there is very much a desire for the sacred bridegroom to die. The sacred brides don't die much. Janis Joplin is one of the very few."
"I think that happiness is when you can let yourself feel every emotion you want at any time instead of being a lying little fuck."
"I'm not into this dieting thing. Chics, more to love. I've got all this cream cheese and they're bring up some poppy seed bagels. I'm going smilin' baby, I'm going smilin"
"You know how women always say men aren't emotionally available. Well, a lot of women aren't emotionally available. It's like, if you're vulnerable, we say, 'Look, we need you to be sensitive.' So you become sensitive, and yet we go, 'You've got no fuckin' backbone.' and we kick you in the face and run off with a ski trainer."
"The cross has been used as a weapon, as it has been used against all women throughout the ages. And that's the greatest evil of all."
"Yeah, I do write about stuff I'm going through, but I think you've got to find a giggle somewhere in stuff that would scare the poop outta ya. That's what fascinates me."
"My mother would talk about Jackie in tears saying, '...when J.F.K. was shot, the country was just torn to pieces because it was like, we are not safe, this woman, with her faith and deep love somewhere in herself, held the nation together.'"
"Each song has a little soul, a little persona, it's own little birth certificate and favorite shoe shops."
"A cornflake girl is wonderbread whereas a raisin girl is whole wheat bread."
"I would like to think I'm a raisin girl, because in my mind they're more open minded. Cornflake girls are totally self centered, don't care about anything or anybody."
"I like butter and the people who like butter."
"I'm known as that girl who has tea with the Devil."
"I'm not afraid of sadness. Yet even when you cry, until you can't cry anymore, you get to the point where you decide, for example, that you want to play with a drummer. Sadness lets you wear stilettos, sadness lets you dance in the moonlight. She just has dark rims around her eyes."
"Everybody has creativity and each person has it in a different way. Some people aren't musical, some musicians can't even think about painting or gardening. There's so many different ways to be creative."
"There are lots of things I don't sing about. Sometimes I put something in a song, but I don't want to wreck someone's life, so I disguise it a little. I don't believe in censorship, but if someone's going to be hurt, names and places should be changed."
"My grandmother was a believer in virgins. She was a Church of God minister. Hey, I was considering sex when I was ten. I was picking them out from my record collection...should it be Robert Plant? I had it all lined up."
"I wanna be burned....definitely burned, like the witches."
"My voice came with age. I was no Shirley Temple. It took years and years to develop. Like you know some little kids have great voices at first but get worse later? Well, I was the opposite."
"Give the kids tools, so they can go build their own houses; not the blueprint of what the houses should be."
"Being exposed to the gay community at 13 would change my views forever."
"My God, you guys, she's 21. Let her fit into tight pants. Let her explore and grow. I did. What is this you're not allowed to explore? Look at me now. I'm breast feeding pigs."
"I wish I had more of a sense of humor. I can be so hard on people. But I'm really into weeing. If somebody's being a jerk, I would like to go wee on their head. And then I do that, mentally."
"If it's yummy, I'm there. But if it's mushed up beetles, I don't think so!"
"I'm a tomato freak, but sometimes you have to get it in ketchup form for people to be able to open to tomatoes."
"The people on the internet know more about what I am doing than I do. Like, they will say that I am going to be in this mall on this day, and sure enough, I am there."
"You walk into a drug store and you just need to get some girl stuff...and you're sitting there with a kinda cute cashier boy person, having you do an autograph over your sanitary napkins for his girlfriend."
"I'm like a lioness who kills her own prey and no one else has to kill for her. But if some other lioness comes to me and says: "I just got a good prey, do you want a piece?" I can say "of course" - and the other way around. It becomes difficult if another lioness comes along and envies me for that I can kill my own prey and she can't and therefore wants to harm me."
"There are things that I would disagree with Jesus about - and I feel really good about that."
"History has recorded some pretty nasty things that have happened to people. I think we remember. I think it's in our cells and I think it can still hurt sometimes."
"I don't believe in the saying that it all happens for the best...it's just not appropriate."
"On bad days I talk to Death constantly, not about suicide because honestly that's not dramatic enough. "
"When am I going to get to the point where I can say 'This is how I feel?' No excuses, no defenses - I don't care if you don't agree with me."
"Of course I believe in past lives, I mean, three quarters of the human race believes this, it's not like a great new thought here."
"The violence between women is unbelievable. Women try to make each other crawl so that their knees are bleeding."
"I never had a fantasy of being a bride as a child after I realised that Robert Plant would never marry me. And with Dad being a preacher, I saw too many weddings. You see, I don't think I could ever have gotten married in America."
"I use innocence in my demeanor like a Venus flytrap."
"i found a way to dance with sorrow"
"some of the most wonderfull people are the ones who dont fit into boxes"
"In twenty years we're gonna wake up in a tidal wave of crap."
-On her environmental concerns for the future
"Please tell me what cellulite cream I should use, before I get the wrong one."
"Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much. But, you have to crawl into the wounds to discover what your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin."
"I'm a musician first, a food lover second, a dirty mouth with feet, and a girl last time i checked"
"i do sound like the little mermaid on acid"
"i do like to talk about things no one wants to hear at the dinner table"
"I'm not interested in being a really nice person; I want to be a creative, responsible person that's balanced."
"I cannot divulge to whom the hand belongs, but the gesture is called Mr. Puppethead and he's definitely an alter ego. His taste in things is quite questionable. He's getting his own song. He has a pair of handcuffs and a lip ring."
"In the name of Christianity, we've done some awful, awful things."
"boys are cute but food is cuter"
"I want it hot and sweet."
-On how she likes her bagels
"Do any of you dream about crocodiles? Well, this is the thing. I dream about crocodiles, girls, all the time. And its the strangest thing. Because, you know, it's not a pretty thing I dream about. So if any of you interpret dreams you can write it down and tell me what you think because I really don't know, I don't know anything about dreams. But I dream this crocodile is eating my carrot! Now this could be a problem about a bad hair dye day, I'm not quite sure what it means. But I know I dream about crocodiles. I'm obsessed with them. I love them, so if you have any thoughts write me a note. But other than that that's all I'm thinking about right now."
"There are some really good things about the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus had nothing to do with modern day Christianity."
"If people can't see things from the other side that's not my problem, it's theirs."
"I think I give equal time in my hatred, right? So that it's not like, sometimes I'm really mad at myself because of what I'm doing, sometimes I'm mad at some guy, sometimes I'm mad at some girl, and sometimes I'm totally loving some guy, so and sometimes I'm loving some girl."
"Well, Pele is the volcano goddess and I thought of like, um, sacrificing some of the boys in my life to her but then I decided that that wasn't really a very good idea."
". . .anger originates from envy and outrage: not being seen; not being heard. Your worst enemies are made when you ignore people. Those boys in America who shot dead classmates recently, didn't do that because they woke up with a positive self image that morning and then felt like slaughtering their friends. No, they felt ignored, rejected, humiliated, and wanted revenge."
"You know that saying, 'Bad things don't happen to good people'? That's a painful lie, and it hits you on such a core level."
"We don't know where souls go when they die. We don't know a lot of things. We didn't create the planets. We didn't do this all by ourselves. So, therefore, why wouldn't there be a creative force if it can create humans and planets?"
"I've been hanging out with some of the Hell's Angels in England. They're some of the sweetest people I've ever met."
"I think I'm honest on all the records. I think that Little Earthquakes made such an impression because it was the first time you heard that from me -- it's like a virgin experience."
"Real friends have to be understanding of eachother, and their faults."
"My male worth was quite good. Chemically I'm not interested in women in that way. The smell of men seems to make me want to merge physically, but again I've always had a real problem embracing the feminine."
"I have a real good shrink, and we started beading a necklace, you know...a little bead here, a little bead there. A memory, a moment and then one day something shifted."
"When you've got the virgin and the whore sitting next to eachother, they're likely to judge eachother harshly."
"At the age of 3, I was playing the piano, at 4, I was composing and at 5 I decided I would be a rock star."
"I don't hang out with many celebs on a regular basis. I'm a very close circle. I think I'm really hard to get to know on a personal level."
"I seem to be comfortable with slugs. And thirty crewmen that I feed and take care of. Like all good pets they poop in the corners."
"Thailand is calling me. I had a long lay over in the Bangkok airport and I was drawn to get out of the city and get deeper into the country. I'm actually going there before I make the next work."
"People I see laughing all the time, check for razor blades in their anal-force underwear, because it's just a little lie."
"We put men under pressure too much by expecting them to make us happy. I want to get happy by my inner energy."
"I think it's so obvious when a guitar player can only play a few chords and a couple of riffs, whereas the keyboard player can have all this gear and all these sounds are coming out and it can be very distracting, and yet you realize all they can do is I-IV-V-I, man."
"I'm not interested in taking drugs. I do hallucinogens once in a while for journey experiences."
"I hear the wine. It's like a structure. I see it as a piece. I hear it before I taste it. It's calling me. And then I start to hear it when I'm tasting it. Not that I use crystal suppositories....I'm not New Age."
"The strength it takes to get up and sing that song every night is more than I ever imagined."
-Tori Amos on her song "Me and a Gun"
"Orchards are simple. A peach tree says, 'Some of me will be juicy and some of me will be dry I'm not growing for you; I grow because that's what I do.' You always hear some person complain about how dry their peach is and the peach says, 'It's not our fault you have no understanding on the proper use for dry peaches.'
"I think you have to know who you are, get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it. I don't want to renounce my dark side. The truth has always held an enormous interest for me. Everything is therapeutic, no matter what you do."
"My theory is that women were the Mona Lisas for a long time and now men are Mona Lisas with little goatees. They are our muses."
"If you're gonna tell a story, you have to grow into the head of the rapist as well as the raped."
"Just because I can't write songs sometimes doesn't mean that creative force isn't going. It's cheating on me. It's with Jewel."
"I talk to a lot of strangers through my music. But it's not like I sit down with everybody and have spaghetti afterwards."
"Most boys would like to think they're the flu, wouldn't they? But they're really just a...hachoo."
"I usually get along best with the metal guys...the real, real subversives. I don't know, maybe it's because our paths don't cross much, but I think there's a passion there."
"I hated my name. My body was screaming to be called something, and it wasn't Myra Ellen."
"If you call me an airy-fairy new age hippy waif, I will cut your penis off."
"If I couldn't play, I've no idea what kind of bitter person I would've become. Because that's where I was able to express some kind of freedom without guilt. Guilt for passion."
"Fame is very tricky. It's like a pit full of stuff, some of it is yummy and some it is big monsters. It's a double-edged sword and if you pretend you don't want it you're a liar and that is going to rip your soul to pieces."
"I'm always dreaming that these bulls are chasing me. Half the time I don't get away - I almost get over the fence, and then they gore me."
"I believe in energy, everything is energy. And therefore sometimes magic can be created if somebody is open to letting energy do what it does, instead of being so cynical, that you miss magic happening."
"I feel like a work really has many sides to it when people have such extreme reactions. When a work is greeted with just, 'Oh, you know, it's nice', then it's not affecting people. So love it or hate it, that's okay. That's exciting to me. If you wanted music for your dog to do something on, hey, it's paper, too."
"I heard stories that they brought in this henchman from France, and I really aligned with him. He had Anne [Boleyn] move her hair over [before the execution] and he made her look away. He did it when she didn't know. Even though his job was a bit brutal, he had more compassion than the king. The riddle in 'Talula' is things are not what they seem."
"I am a real believer in looking at pain and taking it out shopping."
