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.

My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.

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

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.

We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.