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

I was quite an insomniac. I rarely slept as a child. Having God to talk to at night was nice.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities.

You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.

What I wanted to do in rock'n'roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line -- you have your own interior world, and it's not neat.