I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal.
People called me the godmother of punk, but I never name myself anything.
I wanted to go to Portland because it's a really good book town.
My mission is to stay healthy and productive and serve as a good example.
As an artist, I used to think that my responsibility was to do good work. But I had to learn from the '70s on that being a public figure presents another aspect of responsibility.
Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris.
I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.
It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.
Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more.
What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Usually when I go to a place for the first time, unless there's something historical or spectacular that nature has to offer, the first thing I like to do is see what's on the minds of the people.
Horses pretty much broke as a record in England.
I didn't begin my life in 1975 with 'Horses.' I recorded 'Horses' in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969.
When I did 'Horses,' I never expected to make another album.
As a citizen, hopefully I'm humanist. As an artist, I'm free.
My parents were very well read. They were both New Englanders, not highly educated, but they had a sophisticated... they were both very humanistic, and they were sophisticated readers.
My parents were very humanistic, but where we lived was not the cultural center of the world. Hardly. So I came to New York for two reasons: to find my own kin and also to get a job. And that's what I came to New York for in '67.
I try not to give too much advice, really, because people have to do their things their way. I got lots of advice when I was young, and I ignored most of it - the good and the bad.
Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.
