I’m not really a nostalgic person.
I’m an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.
The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.
The thing I’ve always liked about performing is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair.
I didn’t know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce.
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
One thing I like about getting older is things, your spectrum widens, your capacity for compassion widens.
The issue of gender was never my biggest concern; my biggest concern was doing good work. When the feminist movement really got going, I wasn’t an active part of it because I was more concerned with my own mental pursuits.
What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn’t have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that’s startling or is so poignant.
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.
What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it’s really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.
I believe myself to be an artist. That was my calling, to do my work, and what’s most important to me is to do the best work I possibly can. And that is what means the most, that is what will endure.
Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo – Jo being the writer and the misfit.
I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
I was so unhealthy as a child, and at least three or four times my parents were told to get ready, that I would not make it.
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.
I wanted to go to Portland because it’s a really good book town.
I had a really happy childhood – my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.
Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.