What did Christ really do? He hung out with hard-drinking fishermen.

The nut of the thing is that if what you make is hard like a diamond, you can put it anywhere. You can put it up your and it will still be beautiful.

My parents wanted to light my artistic candle. But over time, the definition of 'the arts' began to stretch. And as I got older, they suddenly realized, Oh, my God, we're the parents of Iggy Pop.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.

Sex may be a little more factual than love. You know whether it's good or bad. You know whether you liked it or not. You're not going to change your mind about it ten years later.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.