At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.

Fashion, at modern time, was actually a way for women to go out in the world. There was one painting of a woman sitting at a café, drinking a beer by herself and kind of pretending to read but really watching people, that sort of thing. It fascinated me.

If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are.

And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.

When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.

In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore…Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.