Sometimes [people] seem to think I came out of the womb, you know, cursing, with an electric guitar.

For I desired, as Youth does, to be taken by the hand and hurled into the world.

Everybody's got to reclaim these thingspoetry, rock'n'roll, political activismand it's got to be done over and over again. It's like eating: you can't say,'Oh, I ate yesterday'.You have to eat again.

It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.

Most women writers don't interest me because they're hung up with being a woman, they're hung up with being Jewish, they're hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating.

In any performance, you're on stage for two hours, and there's 40 seconds or maybe a whole five minutes where you feel like the whole universe is in place, and you've gone even beyond the universe that you know.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.