Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!
Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.
I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music – I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter – that I got from my dad.
Working with David Bowie was very interesting, but I couldn’t surrender to it. I should have let him produce a record for me, but I’m very perverse in some ways. He’s brilliant, but the entourage were rather daunting.
I was told that I had very likely been clinically depressed for a long, long time, probably since I was 15, or even 14. It explained, to me at least, a lot of my behaviour over the years.
I was anorexic in the ’60s and ’70s, although it wasn’t called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn’t high on my agenda. But it is now.
My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can’t be done.
I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.
I’m interested in time, fame, death, beauty, truth, all those things.
Feminism is the best thing to come out of the ’60’s.
I think it’s a great shame that America stopped being a republic and became an empire.
Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I’ve had lots of shocks because it’s as though I don’t learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.
I wish people didn’t just think of me in the ’60s. I’m not any era.
I’m sick of being self-referential. I don’t want to do any more songs that can be accused of being personal.
Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.