255 Quotes by Rufus Wainwright

Musically I’m able to keep going, because it’s not about money and it’s not about success. It’s a challenge.

I’m not born again, I’m not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be okay. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings.

I think my imagination and my passions are still firing away, but it’s really the body that starts to make up the rules. It’s not a major problem; it’s just when you get a little older you realize how much your body thanks you when you are good to it.

I knew I was gay when I was around 13. There wasn’t the internet, there weren’t support groups, AIDS was everywhere. I mean, it was really dark.

The thing I hate most is false modesty. The artists who are, like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m really not that good. Oh, I can’t believe I’m here.’ I find it vaguely sinister, even.

I’m a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame.

I personally don’t have the ability to lie about my life, for better or for worse.

I very much faced my mother’s death with hard, arduous and time-consuming labor. The more I would do, the less I would feel.

I’ll always be a boulevardier. I have an extreme reverence and romantic longing for all that is decrepit and fatalistic.