I'm not afraid to be a Russian Jewish romantic in my approach to anything, even in my animal divinities, or anything about the feeling.

I never made any money from my music. I don't make that much; I make it flip-flopping between five and ten different disciplines.

Not that I have anything against music now, but I just hated being an anything. I don't know why.

My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating.

There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse.

I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.

I actually started as a singer in Brooklyn, and I lived in a community. To get out of the ghetto of my community, I was a musician.