On handling pressure: "What are you talking about, pressure? I'm great under pressure. I'm a warrior. I'm Rocky, round 12."
The difference between Gaga's high-priestess act and the girl who spends time with her family: "I am—Stefani is—a perpetually tortured artist. That's why I changed my name. I can't be her in public. She would be a mess!"
Quote:
On raging against the critics who question the authenticity of her early struggles: "Everyone is so cynical—that I can't purely love my fans, or share an honest story about my past, without someone asking me if I really, truly struggled. Do you know how much dirt I ate? Do you know the men I had to crawl through, the people that disrespected my body, my mind, my heart?"
Quote:
How she used her forced hiatus to "go back to the core" and prepare to prove herself all over again—this time not just as a pop star but as a pop artist to prepare for her new album Artpop: "I went to look back to myself being 19, with all my Warhol books and all my Yoko Ono and John Lennon CDs, my Rolling Stones CDs and my Bowie…, and I said, what would she want me to do right now? Well she'd want you to call Jeff Koons and Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović and Inez and Vinoodh…And that's what I did!"
Lady Gaga wears a wool dress with satin collar and silk faille sleeves and a pink raccoon-fur headpiece from Schiaparelli with a pony-hair necklace (worn as headpiece) from Bjørg.
Read the full interview in Elle's October issue on newsstands September 24.
The spread is amazing. 
