I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else.

America is run by corporations, it is run by banks and Wall Street. That's why we can't get guns under control. It's because all these lobbyists don't want gun control, they don't want us to have strong environmental safety guards. Young people can become aware of that and they are the most powerful lobby. With a click of a text, you can have millions of people voting for one person.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

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

What I've always tried to do is to express the highest point of me, and rock 'n' roll is the first and the most open form created by our generation. The cool thing about it is that you get the power, you get the rhythm; you can be taken over sexually, you can be taken over cerebrally; it's great to look at - it's a package deal.

I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.