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As a little girl, I had huge fantasies about music.
In England you laugh at yourselves, in France we laugh at others.
In England, you laugh at yourselves; in France, we laugh at others.
I like costumes. I am always dressing up - I'm very English like that.
I was such a tomboy. I had absolutely no bosom, and I wore my hair really short - shaved, like a boy.
I was raised by muses. Women who had men in awe of them and who wrote them movies and wrote them music.
As an actress, you're part of what the director is creating, and as a model, you're representing a designer's vision.
My mother taught me to wash my hair as little as possible, and to rinse it with Coke before a shoot for a sexy, tousled look.
It is impossible for me to get involved in films that I don't like, so I just wait for a project that really tickles my fancy.
Acting seems much easier than singing, in fact, because you are putting on a costume - whereas here you are taking everything off.
The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.
The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great.
I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.
I try to not listen to all the girls I admire musically - like Nina Simone - just so I don't find myself imitating them, even if it's subconsciously.
I think I was pretty much hated in France. The French press ignored me. There was a movement when the children of celebrities faced strong animosity.
I'm a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood - I've carved two of my guitars.
Singing is the rawest thing. Having been naked in films or naked in photo shoots, it's nothing compared to singing. It's absolute nakedness. You are stripped bare!
I'm horrified most of the time. I wish it was more complicated, but at the same time, each time I try to complicate it I hate it because I hate the idea of writing to impress.
There's so many good books, but I'm always like, "I'm sorry, I have five more Faulkners to read, I can't be bothered." Most of the time when you try, you fall on the wrong one.
The silhouette is the most important thing in clothes. Every French girl knows that. High-waisted trousers give you long legs and a pretty bum which, after all, is what we all want.
I listen to a variety of music. The only common point is strong lyrics; I'm more obsessed with lyrics than music. I need to hear a form of truth, and if it's a hard truth, even better.
I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.
I was always the funny-looking girl. I couldn't compete with the Brazilian girls. My nose is off, my ears are too big. But I think it's my personality that these designers were drawn to.
There's something I find highly embarrassing about it. As soon as I think I've written something smart, the next day I've got nausea, thinking, "Don't even try to be smart, it's absurd."
I love acting; I love movie sets and movies, but, at the same time, there's something about the position of women in that world that frightens me a lot. I find it nearly inhuman to be an actress.
It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life. It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing.
The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
The more you’re writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it’s at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
My mum is deeply, deeply a man's woman, a man's muse. Maybe because I'm a kid from the '80s, I'm a bit more dominant. I wanted to be the muse and the director also. I wanted to be the man and the woman.
I've always found that fashion is, first of all, mainly for yourself. So my two icons are, on one side, Little Edie from 'Grey Gardens' and, of course, like all my generation, I'm influenced by Kate Moss.
As soon as it's behind computers and machines, which the majority of the planet loves, I find it cold. I need to hear breathing. I like the idea of the mic being a captation of everything that's happening around.
Music always has to do with vibrations for me. I love to record everyone's heartbeats, in way. None of us beats at the same pace and a song is a magical moment where different entities, for a split second, meet up.
What I realized is that the desire for making 'Places' came from the fact that I've got this strange situation with having been born in the glitter, born on the other side of the mirror that everyone fantasizes about.
I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess - I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.
Music came as the best thing for me at home, where no one can tell you anything. For years I was so closed, wanting to do it exactly like I had it in my head, because this would be the only place that was superpersonal.
I hate short hair on men - the 'real' man is something I don't know. My dad was always playing with hairbands, making rings, while the women were wearing jeans, white T-shirts and Converse. That was the uniform at home.
Home has always been wherever I am. I'm not very attached to walls - or people, for that matter - so I've always loved travelling around. A book in my back pocket, a diary, and a pen is all I need to call any place home.
I always have lipstick, and use the same lipstick for my cheeks as blush, so that it looks very natural. It's a good trick I learned from my mother. I like NYX or MAC because they have a lot of pigment and they're matte.
'Blanche' opened a new door for me without really making me more famous. 'Blanche' was a risk, but that is the only thing that excites me in this profession. The knowledge that I am an actress who takes risks lifts my soul.
My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.
I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I like the idea of going on stage without makeup, without the hair being done, in the jeans and shirt I've been wearing all day. At first that was an issue, because I didn't want to be disrespectful.
In a modern world where a majority of women say, 'I don't need you, I've got my money, I've got my stuff,' I say, 'I desperately need men.' My whole album is a tribute to men. It takes a man in me to tell you that I'm on my knees for men.
Luckily, I was raised by a kind of gypsy family, which is why I always get along better with people who worked in circuses than with kids of other actors. My mom was so carefree with us in a beautiful way. We were used to sleeping anywhere.
If Rihanna stripped it all down morally rather than with her clothes, perhaps we'd get closer to Nina Simone. She's talented, but all we want is to sing the truth. If Britney Spears was to sing closer to her heart, she might have been the new Bobby Gentry or Dolly Parton.
Yeah, you always have to be there and remind people of you. It's complicated when you do music, or when you do anything in general. You need time. I don't know if it's because of the weather or what, but [Canadians] seem to have a relationship to time that I like very much.
My mother is old-fashioned; she raised us like girls from a 19th-century book. My sisters and I are known for being the most polite girls in France. My mother wanted us to be like royalty: never ever will you be caught being rude, or superficial or being a star or whatever.
My mission is to get on the stage and say, 'Listen, I'm a woman, I'm free, I'm a mother, I'm a lover, I'm a friend; I'm shattered by men most of the time, but I'll keep falling in love with them because it's the most thrilling thing in the world; that's what makes me human.'
I'm in my father's car at age 9 or 10 crying to Leonard Cohen's 'Famous Blue Raincoat,' thinking that you could write nearly a love letter to a man who betrayed you by having an affair with your wife. I was thinking how wonderful and pure music can be for explaining situations.
The French press can be very harsh, and the one thing they can't bear is multi-tasking. They despise it to the highest degree, so from the age of five I've been taught that if I did two things at the same time, it meant I didn't know how to do one. It's an obsession that they have.
The English and Japanese are the most inventive dressers in the world, but French girls are the most beautiful. I am still always amazed by the style of French girls, and the only reason is that they dress according to themselves and not according to fashion. They know what suits them.