Rupaul Quotes

If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?

my goal is to always come from a place of love ...but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker

We all came into this world naked. The rest is all drag.

When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.

We're born naked, and the rest is drag.

All sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money.

With hair, heels, and attitude, honey, I am through the roof.

Look at me--a big old black man under all of this makeup, and if I can look beautiful, so can you.

When the going gets tough, the tough reinvent.

Whatever you proclaim as your identity here in the material realm is also your drag. You are not your religion. You are not your skin color. You are not your gender, your politics, your career, or your marital status. You are none of the superficial things that this world deems important. The real you is the energy force that created the entire universe!

True wealth is having a healthy mind, body, and spirit. True wealth is having the knowledge to maneuver and navigate the mental obstacles that inhibit your ability to soar.

My attitude toward friendship has remained the same. I will support and encourage you with all the love in my heart, but if it's not reciprocal, I gotta go [...] If your friends are bitter about your success to the extent that they act out, don't expect them to change [...] Move on.

And If I fly or if I fall, at least I can say I gave it all.

Whatever people think of me is none of my business.

You want to know the truth about drugs? You can only go one or two ways. You can go up, or you can go down. That's it. After a certain point, though, no matter what you do, what you take, you don't go anywhere, and that's when you've got to sit down and face yourself.

If you have goals and the stick-with-it-ness to make things happen, people will feel threatened by you, especially if your goals don’t include them. They believe that if you take a piece of pie, then that leaves less pie for them. Seeing you follow your dreams leaves them realizing that they’re not following theirs. In truth, there is unlimited pie for everyone!

Walking with your chest out and your head held high says you have earned the right to stomp and pummel this particular piece of real estate.

I'm six foot four - hello. And with hair, heels, and attitude... I'm through the mother-freakin' roof!

The amount of respect you have for others is in direct proportion to how much respect you have for yourself.

It's a sort of piss-take on culture, because a drag queen is a clown - a parody of our society. It's a sarcastic spoof on culture, which allows us to laugh at ourselves - but in a way that is inclusive of everyone.

I change clothes at least three times a day. It's the only way I can justify all the shopping I do. Prada to the grocery store? Yes! Gucci to the dry cleaner's? Why not? Dolce & Gabbana to the corner deli? I insist!

Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product [...] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics [...] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!

Ego loves identity. Drag mocks identity. Ego hates drag.

remember to love yourself, because if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen in here?

And life reminds me, again and again: You have to dismantle the old to make the space for something new.

Did you take your sassy pills tonight, Jules?” “Seriously, Jane. I will cut a bitch.” “Where did you even learn that expression? Have you been watching RuPaul’s Drag Race again?

Life was just one big fucking joke. Anyone who was taking it seriously was missing the point.

I realize that no one has been crueler to me than I have been to myself. The most dangerous place on earth is inside my head.

But I will not be ignored. The soul that lives inside this body will not be ignored. I am here to stay.

It’s as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer.

Happiness is wanting what you already have.

The point about pop culture is that so much of it is borrowed. There's very little that's brand new. Instead, creativity today is a kind of shopping process—picking up on and sampling things form the world around you, things you grew up with.

You are born naked, the rest is drag.

Life is about using the whole box of crayons.

Being booed off stage is just an applause from ghosts!

Through my observations, it became clear that most of society’s rules and customs are rooted in fear and superstition!

Reading is fundamental.

After licking my wounds, I created new dreams. I planted more seeds. I had begun to understand that my ability to change my perception and reinvent myself was my trump card.

Shifting my priorities from worrying about what other people think of me to fortifying myself with the truth of who I really am is how I constantly fill that void.

The mantle of glamour has been taken from the women and given to the men. The women toil in their shadows, plain and ordinary-looking. So that transition has left a void. It is a void for drop-dead, impossible, over-the-top glamour. Supermodels fill that void. The only thing they have to do is work the runway, sweetie, and refuse to get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars.

In the great tradition of Paris Is Burning, bring out your library cards! Because reading is what? Fundamental!

Much as we seek power in every corner of our lives, it's always already in us. It's impossible to be powerless. If you recognized it, you yourself are power. Life is power.

To this day it cracks me up to think that my debut on national British television as a reporter ends with me turning a trick.

AVOID DUMB PEOPLE. DO NOT TRY TO EDUCATE THEM OR TRY TO PROVE HOW SUPERIOR YOU ARE TO THEM. JUST SMILE AND STAY AWAY FROM THEM.

You have to find a tribe.

Everyone knows about the diminishments of growing older, but no one talks about the expanding strengths. Paired with intellect, your intuition grows increasingly stronger and more on point.

Never save bath bombs for later. Never wait for a special occasion to light candles. Don’t wait to book a massage. Treat yourself to a spa day. Get yourself a colonic immediately. Now is the time. Your body is a temple. Serve it and it will serve you well.

Life was just like this, sometimes. You think you’re going to sail off into the sunset with Prince Charming, and instead you end up listening to a stranger getting his dick sucked on a Greyhound bus.

When I meet kids who suffer, I want to teach them everything I know about the world, which isn’t a lot, and basically amounts to: Go to Harvard. Make hella money. Read contracts before you sign them. Bring two tiny bottles of Kahlúa and a tiny bottle of mouthwash when you have to go with your parents to their biopsy results. I follow my own advice while trying to hold off on the suicidal ideation while trying to be as socially fucking mobile as socially fucking possible and then these kids fucking find me, and what do I do, but invite them into my heart and tell them, babes, go to school, climb the ranks, kill the salutatorian, make it look like an accident, and in your valedictory address, remind your school that cops are pigs, and ICE are Nazis, and you are John at the foot of the cross, Jesus’s most loved apostle, maybe his lover, and you’re in the holy word, escape to my home for some chamomile tea and RuPaul, there will always be room for you, I love you and forever will.

The dogs went crazy last night,” Gennie said. “Do you want me to tell you about it?” “Definitely,” Grace replied. “Start at the beginning. Leave nothing out. What are the dogs’ names?” “Bernie Sanders, Elliot Stabler, Olivia Benson, Sandra Day O’Connor, and RuPaul were the troublemakers,” Gennie said. “Unsurprising, with that group,” Grace said. “Go on.

Drag for me has always been my superhero costume.

All I wanted was to feel something real, something beyond all these mistaken priorities that I was sure didn’t matter.

I’ve been a daydreamer since day one. I much prefer looking out a window over looking at my phone.

I hear the voice of my darkness, and I say thanks for sharing, lover, but I’m going to do the opposite of what you’re saying.

As the great RuPaul once said, “My intention is to always come from a place of love, but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker.

Think healthy thoughts. Even if you have every right to complain, don’t do it. If it’s raining, learn to dance in the rain. You are the architect of your life. Please believe it and let that be the reason.

Life is full of dualities: night and day, black and white, yin and yang, good and evil, birth and death, love and fear. You can't have one without the other. It takes two to create the magnetic pull to generate energy in the first place. This is the natural order: that everything, in contrast, hangs in perfect balance.

I had learned to transcend my skewed limitations by changing my perception. Understanding that process on an intellectual level is the beginning. Practicing it on an emotional level is success. I created new dreams

Having money, power, and respect pacifies the ego only temporarily and does nothing to relieve the deeper feeling of emptiness. We’re all sold on this idea that wholeness can be bought, married into, or wished real hard for, but the more substantial definition of success requires a lot more than just worldwide recognition and acquiring things.

Willingly release the hurt. Don't let the heartache define you.

Drag really is all about dipping into pop culture and then reshaping it into something else.

Catching a cold is your body’s way of saying, “Bitch, you need to sit yo’ ass down.

If you can't love yourself. How in the hell you gonna love somebody else?

…there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall.

Often when people get together because of sex or some animal magnetism and that wears off, they end up thinking: I don’t like this motherfucker.

By wanting something as vast and untamable as the ocean, I had revealed my own desire to experience the fullness of life.

You have to dismantle the old to make the space for something new.

I barely speak English, but I’m fluent in throwing shade.

Remember, the best time to get a new job is when you already have one.

Challenge yourself to the limits of your fears. Get moving on.

My drag is less about looking like a woman and more about saying F.U. to the cult of systematic masculinity I was bombarded with as a little boy.

Don't let the weight of the world flatten your weave.

Throwing shade takes a bit of creativity. Being a bitch takes none.

My lips are overdrawn to compensate for my lack of not giving a shit

They didn't know which box to put me in so I think it was easier to just see past me

I feel bad for men in our culture. I think we do everyone a disservice by hiding our emotions.

Ultimately, it’s about the love you give and the love you allow yourself to receive. Everything else fades away.

Some people are so poor, all they have is money.

My wealth would not rely on what other people assumed about me. True wealth is having a healthy mind, body, and spirit. True wealth is having the knowledge to maneuver and navigate the mental obstacles that inhibit your ability to soar.

the two of them all GQ’d up for Last Meal. Both wore slacks, not jeans, and sweaters, not sweatshirts, and loafers, not shitkickers. They were clean-shaven, cologned, and coiffed, but they were not she-males in the slightest. Frankly, that would have made things a lot easier. For fuck’s sake, he wished one of the SOBs would RuPaul their shit and go all feather boa and fingernail polish. But no. They just kept looking like two too-hot males who knew how to spend their money at Saks

Life comes in seasons. There are the seasons where you are driving through a snowstorm, just trying to keep your eye on the road ahead to stay alive. Your ego stands in the doorway of every good idea, keeping them from you. We avoid the pain. We put our blinders on and stay focused on what’s right ahead, turning away from the thing we need to see in our periphery, because we know accepting it will force us to question everything we hold so tightly. But then there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall. When it finally settles, that’s when you find yourself in the house of hidden meanings. You study the patterns that keep coming up. You allow them to show you something different, even if it’s the thing you’ve been running from your whole life. You run into the fire, run through the pain, trusting that the only way out is through.

On Atheism – If people continue to think of atheism as a kind of religion, then I demand all the perks that real religions get. I want to build big empty buildings where like-minded people can gather once a week to debate a non-existent deity. I want tax-exempt status. I want real food, not cheap wine and crackers. I want a rocking band. I want altar men! Not altar boys—altar MEN—and I want them to look like the chain-clad guy who hands an envelope to RuPaul at the beginning of “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”.

The theme of the winner's circle is adaptability, but at the same time, staying true to your own unique frequency and that's the truth, not only in this competition, but in everything in life; taking those cues from the universe - and applying them - but without losing who you are.

When you find success, sometimes you have to leave old friends behind. And sometimes you have to leave family members behind. It’s sad and heartbreaking, but it must be done. You cannot bring everybody with you, because some will resent you and drag you down to a level that makes them feel more comfortable.

You’re born naked and the rest is drag.” In truth, you are not your clothes, you are not your profession, you are not your religion. You are an extension of the consciousness that guides the universe, for which there is no name because it cannot be defined. That’s why all the superficial things you list as your identity are in reality your “drag.

There are ideological precepts that people will fight or even kill for. But those things are never really what they seem to be. As much as people will claim a hard moral line, that line becomes very blurry depending on what their needs are at any given moment - like the conservative politician who's opposed to abortion, unless it's for his mistress.

All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear. When you hear stereotypes about Black people who can't swim or are afraid of dogs, it's because for so many generations, they were afraid of swimming across bodies of water to flee, or afraid of dogs because they were scared of being chased. Those fears are epigenetic - they burrow deep into the subconscious, creating an internal paradigm of rules that you forget can be broken. Systemic oppression created walls that can feel impossible to scale, but so, too, does the inherited belief that you are victim. People hold on to that victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity. Nobody's going to take that away from them. It runs too deeply to take out and examine under the light.

Home, I know, is right in this moment—in this body. We have houses everywhere. So I keep my bags packed, to make me resourceful such that I can make magic wherever I am. I let go of my mother’s hand. I go off to school. I go to work. I go out onstage. I leave home, over and over again, and then I come back. I sit on that porch, waiting for my father, knowing that he will never come, and then I let him go, time after time. I say goodbye. How could he be so cruel as to leave me waiting there on that stoop? But I project onto him the consciousness that I have now. I would never make my child wait for me on the front porch—it would be cruel, and I know better. But he didn’t know any better. It never would have occurred to him, because he wasn’t awake. Unlike my mother, who saw me, my father could not. The number one evil that we face is unconsciousness. And now that I am older, I understand the wisdom that was always waiting for me, so simple and so obvious but so hard to learn— His loss.

Hell, I even think a unibrow is sexy

I love dancing. I have always loved to dance. It’s the way the human spirit gets aroused.

To understand humans, you must study them as a species of animal.

The gift you can give to other people is allowing them to give you something.

There’s a reason I’ve been the top bitch in the game for more than twenty-five years.

rendition of “Supermodel (You Better Work)” by none other than RuPaul!

She could go through a car wash and she’d still come out looking like RuPaul’s immaculately groomed, more flamboyant granny.

If we want to be seen as legendary, we have to weave ourselves into history. If we were to make a quilt of drag, I'd want pieces from all over. A stretched hide from a shaman's tent; silk from Gladys Bentley's tuxedo; sequins from Divine's wiggle dress; hair from RuPaul's wig.

If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?

Por nuestro hilo notaba que estaba mal, pero él nunca me quería decir por qué de primeras, como si no quisiese darle presencia cuando estábamos a solas, o solo para no revivir aquellas cosas que rozaban, tocaban y retorcían lo grotesco. Al final siempre me lo decía. Me daba mucha pena. En esos momentos quería estar con él más que nunca. No para besarle ni para demostrar que me tenía colada por completo, sino para darle un hombre donde apoyarse, para darle un abrazo para comprarle un paquete de pipas y sentarme con él en su banco a comer tijuana y a escuchar Crystal Castles. Le hablaría de mi gata Virutas para que se alegrara, le enseñaría fotos suyas y nos reiríamos juntos. Le comentaría mi amor por Winnie The Pooh y su amigo Puerquito, que es así como se llama en mi cabeza. Cómo un día me pasé el día con mi familia en el Max Center, el epicentro comercial de Barakaldo, y me compraron un libro de Puerquito que me hizo feliz. Le escucharía todos los minutos y las horas que necesitase soltarlo todo, nuestros clásicos let it out. Le haría reír con mis cosas de Pringada y con sus cosas de fan. Le tumbará en un césped escucharíamos The Cure mirando al cielo. Le pasaría un rotulador para que entre entretuviese pintándome barbaridades en los brazos. Le recordaría la escena de Phiphi vs. Sharon de RuPaul's Drag Race y el fracaso que fue Serena ChaCha. Le permitiría ser pedante sobre lo mala que le parece American Beauty, mi peli favorita. Le preguntaría sobre los orígenes de PXXR GVNG, el realismo sucio de Bukowski, su descubrimiento de The Drums y el outfit que tenía pensado llevar a nuestra próxima pinchada en Razzmatazz. Le haría elegir entre Vetements y Maison Margiela. Le sacaría todas sus nuevas ideas estéticas de haute cuture, como juntar dos camisas en una y parecer la promesa de la próxima MET Gala. Le haría saber que dentro de mí hay alguien que le acepta, le admira y le quiere tal y como es, sin cambiar ni una pizca, sin miedo a que parezca un maricón o a que pierda las formas con gente que en realidad importa una mierda. Le enseñaría que hay un mundo ahí fuera con más freaks como nosotros y que él era una estrella de las cegadoras que había ahí arriba. Que vivir en un mundo pequeño no le condenaba a una vida pequeña. la aseguraría que lo arreglarían mientras me haría un nudo de la garganta, dejaría mis bloqueos y le abrazaría hasta que se le fuese toda la tristeza por los pies. Y si se nos hacía de noche le dejaría mi chaqueta para que no se congelase de frío.

Dear God [that’s what I say, and you can use whatever you choose], Thank you. I ask that you guide my thoughts, my feelings, and my perceptions. I willingly give you all of my resentments.

This was the only sensation in my little life that activated me. I watched the speedometer tick up, I felt the pedal beneath my feet, the bass throb through the speakers. I belonged to no one but myself. This moment and this beat; that was enough.