Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free.

It's Steven's [Sebring] view of what he saw in traveling and working with me. But on another scale, I think the film [Dream of Life] is very humanistic: It touches on motherhood, death, birth, art, laundry, anger against the Bush administration... While I don't think it's the kind of film where one goes to find some of the darker, edgier aspects of life, the film was born of grief.

Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter.

A good artist's always got his hand in his zipper.

We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.