In Italy I'm big because they're all so sex-obsessed. In Germany I succeeded because they've been waiting for someone like Marlene Dietrich to come a… - Amanda Lear

I don't care when I was born, if I'm 50, 60 or 70. It's important that I am alive.

I'd grown up thinking I was ugly, ugly, ugly. I was much too tall, I was much too skinny, I was flat-chested, I had my mother's Asian eyes and cheekbones so I looked foreign compared to all my girlfriends, my mouth was too big and my teeth were too big so I never smiled. And then Françoise Hardy had her breakthrough in France and everything suddenly changed. Before her you were supposed to look like Brigitte Bardot, blonde, curvy and busty. But I was about twenty when people started telling me "You know what, you look a little like Françoise Hardy, you could be a model" and then out of the blue this famous woman, the great Catherine Harlé turns up. By sheer accident she happened to see me in the street in Paris and asked me if I wanted to be a fashion model and I thought she was joking! And she said "No, no, no, you're exactly the type of girl we're looking for" and all of a sudden all of these flaws, all the things I'd been so ashamed of, became my greatest assets. By sheer accident, as most things in my career.

Compilations, to me, are embarrassing. To bring out a compilation, to me, is to say, "Look. I've got no new material so please buy this. I need money to pay the rent." I think it's very embarrassing. And that is very annoying because the record company owns all those titles and they don't ask me for my advice. They just decide to release "the best of" compilations and they put out a lot of very bad quality music. There are a couple of good titles but the rest are just tracks to fill out the album. And they know very well that they can't rely on me promoting them because I won't promote such records.