Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?
Hung-up women can’t produce anything but mediocre art, and there ain’t no room for mediocre art.
I’m not saying I wasn’t flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.
An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
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?
I’ve said this over and over, but I’ll say it a million more times – I’m concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we’re losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.
I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.
I had gone to Paris to immerse myself in painting and I came back wholly involved in words and rhythms.
Punk rock is just another word for freedom.
No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.
These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.
Technology is 50% of rock ‘n’ roll – the magic, the art, the performance. If you don’t have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you’re totally naked.
I immersed myself in books and rock ‘n’ roll, the adolescent salvation...
I think some of that hopelessness of my generation got passed on to later generations – the sense of uselessness.
I like energy. I like to feel it cracklin’, I like sexual energy in a room, and I like tension.
People don’t realize we have these built-in seven-league boots. The body can go anywhere. It is physically capable of sustaining almost any kind of abuse, or any dream.
I love to photograph the tools of one’s trade: Duncan Grant’s paintbrushes, the typewriter of Herman Hesse, or even my own guitar, a 1957 Fender Duo-Sonic.
When I’m on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.
If you don’t have what you need, just rock with what you’ve got!