Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

I didn't have any career design. I was not thinking about publishing or doing a record. I was just working. I was evolving. I wanted to really comprehend what I was doing before stepping too far out.

I was so horny in school it felt like my body was filled with electricity. I felt like I had neon bones or something.

I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that.

In 1974, when I started working with the material that became Horses, a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

When I stopped performing for 16 years and lived in Michigan and was married and raising my children, I wrote about four or five books. I haven't published them.