I’m more concerned with the work people do than their gender. When I was younger, I was pretty judgmental. Things had to be a certain way. Now I just want to see the work. It doesn’t matter who does it.
People came at me with all sorts of offers, wanting to make me into a hard-core Cher. I had no desire for any amount of money to be reformed for someone’s vision, because in the end, that’s what you got: your clay in someone else’s hands.
I think I work in two worlds. I’ll always try to kick through a wall. I did that when I was younger and I still have my way of doing that.
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.