World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.

There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.

Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.

Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation.

What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.