The worst thing about that kind of prejudice... is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.

This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.

My name sounds French but that's just a stage name.

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now - that's all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I'm doing and why.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?