You know the first objective is to get out of your hometown, second objective, get it together in the capital. The awful thing about left the school, is that you'd feel you'd be important. It would matter what you did.

Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I've had lots of shocks because it's as though I don't learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.

I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.

The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.

I've made a contribution to my time and my generation through being myself, not through what I shared with the Rolling Stones. It's very bad for me and very dangerous to see myself as someone who had an influence on this song or that song. It immediately puts me in the position where my worth is dependent on how much of my soul I shared with Mick Jagger, and it's just not valid. You can use the gossip you've heard. You're not getting it from me.

I think it's a great shame that America stopped being a republic and became an empire.