You don't have to take yourself so seriously all the time.

You're always striving for a place of Zen. Or a flow state, where you kind of transcend reality and you go to the other place. It's when everything is in sync, and everyone is connecting with one another. Everything is going perfectly. You lose yourself. It's the ultimate form of meditation where it's an out - of - body experience. Afterward you come back to Earth and you're like, 'What just happened? We just did something awesome!' It's this energy in the room when you know you're nailing it and you know everyone else is feeling it too. That's why theater is so awesome.

We all just kinda did everything we thought we were supposed to do and girls dated the guys they were supposed to and did things with the guys they were supposed to.

You always have that moment where you grow up and you're like, "Oh, my god, I'm being exactly like my mother." I think that's everyone's greatest hope and worst fear.

I think I did realize that early on, and then I went through a fun phase where I was figuring out who I was and the different sides of myself. I think like most women, I bought into a certain ideal of beauty that I didn't quite fit into, and I tried to pretzel myself and alter myself to be what I was told is beautiful, and then I realized that you are in control of what you think is beautiful.

I haven't got many tattoos, but the two that are most important to me are music tattoos. I have a black heart with a lightning bolt down the middle. And the black heart was for Manson and the lightning bolt down the middle was for David Bowie. I have black diamond with circles that keep swirling and swirling, and it's surrounded by sort of crazy diamonds because Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" really inspired me, and everybody's called me Crazy Diamond since I was a teenager, so it was always important to me.

I had been in a place where I was letting too many people dictate who I should be and what I should be, and I was trying to make everybody happy to the point where it was just killing me. I'd completely lost myself. It's kind of funny now that people think I've completely changed myself for Marilyn Manson, when this is actually the first time in my life that I took a stand and said, "This is who I am and this is who I've always wanted to be, and I'm finally with somebody who lets me be who I want to be."