Top 70 Marianne Faithfull Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!”

— Marianne Faithfull

2. “I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.”

— Marianne Faithfull

3. “I know for a fact that Heaven and Hell are here on Earth.”

— Marianne Faithfull

4. “The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin’s.”

— Marianne Faithfull

5. “I’m a Capricorn, and they flower late.”

— Marianne Faithfull

6. “I’ve got to where I’ve always wanted to be. I just feel more myself, and I’ve learned not to care what other people think. It’s happened slowly, very slowly. But I did it.”

— Marianne Faithfull

7. “Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.”

— Marianne Faithfull

8. “Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I’ve had lots of shocks because it’s as though I don’t learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.”

— Marianne Faithfull

9. “I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.”

— Marianne Faithfull

10. “Relationships have a nasty habit of reversing themselves; whatever has been done to you in a previous involvement you’ll do to the next person you’re involved with, if you get half a chance.”

— Marianne Faithfull

11. “All I have to do is what’s right for me.”

— Marianne Faithfull

12. “I do take care of myself; I get my nails done, and I have a skin doctor, but that’s it. I’m clean and groomed.”

— Marianne Faithfull

13. “It has been an extraordinary experience and, in many ways, extremely positive.”

— Marianne Faithfull

14. “I was anorexic in the ’60s and ’70s, although it wasn’t called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn’t high on my agenda. But it is now.”

— Marianne Faithfull

15. “I live a very nice life. I have a wonderful time. But it’s not lived drawing on a full level. I’m relaxed, cool, and enjoying it.”

— Marianne Faithfull

16. “If I let myself sink into depression, I won’t be able to get out. And then I’ll be awfully unhappy. I just have to turn my face to the light and walk on. And trust that things will be all right.”

— Marianne Faithfull

17. “Of course I have regrets; I’m not stupid.”

— Marianne Faithfull

18. “I never saw myself as beautiful. I can look back and see it now, but then? Never.”

— Marianne Faithfull

19. “Working with David Bowie was very interesting, but I couldn’t surrender to it. I should have let him produce a record for me, but I’m very perverse in some ways. He’s brilliant, but the entourage were rather daunting.”

— Marianne Faithfull

20. “Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.”

— Marianne Faithfull

21. “I don’t talk about my private life.”

— Marianne Faithfull

22. “I’m alive today, I’m well, I’m working, I’m still creative. What more can I say, really?”

— Marianne Faithfull

23. “I never like photos of myself in the beginning. I live with them for three months, put them in a drawer, take them out and look again. I hate the way I look, but of course it’s really not that bad.”

— Marianne Faithfull

24. “The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.”

— Marianne Faithfull

25. “When you lose your reputation at 19, you lose everything.”

— Marianne Faithfull

26. “Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.”

— Marianne Faithfull

27. “Never apologize, never explain – didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”

— Marianne Faithfull

28. “Feminism is the best thing to come out of the ’60’s.”

— Marianne Faithfull

29. “When I found out my mother wanted me to marry a rich man, I instantly didn’t want any rich man.”

— Marianne Faithfull

30. “My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can’t be done.”

— Marianne Faithfull

31. “The food that’s never let me down in life is porridge, especially with milk and maple syrup, which is delicious. Paris isn’t a porridge place, but I can buy it in London when I’m there and bring it back with me.”

— Marianne Faithfull

32. “I’m having a great life, and I want to go on having one.”

— Marianne Faithfull

33. “Chris Black-well, who owned Island Records. Blackwell loved the tracks and said, “Let’s take it the whole way.” My God, we were on! We cut the rest of.”

— Marianne Faithfull

34. “I’ve got a lot of little compulsive problems, and I’ve thought about it a lot. And one of the things I ask myself is, ‘What are the things I can do that won’t hurt me and will help me?’ The first answer is work.”

— Marianne Faithfull

35. “I serve black tea, which I call Froggy tea. And I have green teas and all sorts of nice teas. I’m serving tea all the time.”

— Marianne Faithfull

36. “I’m glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.”

— Marianne Faithfull

37. “I’ve done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go.”

— Marianne Faithfull

38. “The whole Redlands business gave a patina of gravity to his personality.”

— Marianne Faithfull

39. “I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.”

— Marianne Faithfull

40. “I’m sick of being self-referential. I don’t want to do any more songs that can be accused of being personal.”

— Marianne Faithfull

41. “When you are 18, 19, 20, you’re used to being photographed all the time, in a certain way. So, the narcissism becomes almost out of control. And the way that young women are photographed, they become addicted to this feedback of the image.”

— Marianne Faithfull

42. “I’ve learnt to accept what has happened to my voice, I suppose, but I do wish it didn’t sound quite so rough.”

— Marianne Faithfull

43. “I do have a strong sense of God. It’s impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.”

— Marianne Faithfull

Featured in: Strong Quotes

44. “I haven’t got purity, and I don’t think I ever did. I have always been, even as a child, a very decadent little person.”

— Marianne Faithfull

45. “Well, I really didn’t enjoy some of the movies I did when I was young.”

— Marianne Faithfull

46. “My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they’d pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting.”

— Marianne Faithfull

47. “For some people, marriage may be very groovy. For me, it really isn’t. I don’t think it really is for most people anyway. Most people are not very happy.”

— Marianne Faithfull

48. “France has been very good for me. It has given me a very worldly-cool attitude.”

— Marianne Faithfull

49. “I get all dressed up with that Marianne Faithfull face, and the next thing I know, I’m blurting out things that I shouldn’t, trying to get attention when, really, I’ve got everybody’s attention already.”

— Marianne Faithfull

50. “The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.”

— Marianne Faithfull