Too many memoirs focus on childhoods and it's a bit turgid.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

I've always lived all over the place, and left Manchester the minute I was old enough to steal a car.

You can always find something better to do than writing when you're at home.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

I'm not much of a team player when it comes to making records, I've got to say.

Dutch food is terrible, I think. What sort of person starts the day with egg and cheese?

Most cities are the same.

I've been kept from honest employment for a long, long time now. Thank God!

The one thing I got right was that I already looked like a punk when punk arrived.

I quite like cooking, but not to the extent that I look on a kitchen as a domain.

I'm not one of nature's campers. I'm not even a glamper.

Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.

I wish I could drive.

I would describe my style of dress as careful.

It's miserable wearing black all the time, unless you're Johnny Cash.

I don't work with anybody I don't like, just for the attention.

I love singing. I'm a great singer.

I had a million jobs before I managed to make a living out of poetry.

Doris Day was the perfect woman.

I love being in a car.

Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.

Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?

Texas women have an amazing sense of purpose when they lose it. They're the best girls in the world - they're loyal and fun, but when they get mad, they'll try to kill you.

I think that taking night trains or meeting someone on the road is pretty romantic. I've done a couple of things like that. I've surprised someone in Paris. And hopefully, when you surprise someone, they're happy to see you.

My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don't trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.

If I'm in something that I think is kinda good, it stays with me like a fever dream for a long time afterwards. I don't recall the finished product so much as the feeling of making it.

But, you know, I'm sorry, I think democracy requires participation. I mean, I don't want to proselytize but I do feel some sort of duty to participate in the process in some way other than just blindly getting behind a political party.

Death is a billion-dollar business. They can't even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun. Why don't you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver's license? It's totally insane.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

I have a good friend who's a Texas girl; Texas girls are a whole different breed.

Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.

I kept saying that I'd never live in L.A., and I didn't think I would. But that's where the work is, and I ended up making a lot of friends there, and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too. And also, I think when you're famous, its hard to live in a small town.

I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

Nope, no sex scandals yet. But I am open to offers!

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.

I was only in one of the John Hughes films, and I never saw the other ones. I didn't understand them. I kept hearing a really hip 40-year-old person talking in teenagers' mouths.

Well, I think any actor can probably identify with being a professional liar. You don't always look at yourself that way, but I know a lot of days I do.

It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

If you're a movie star, there's a cycle you go through: adoration, adulation, you're used, and then you're discarded. And it happens again and again, always in that sequence.

I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.

It's a very frightening time when something as basic as due process is seen as somehow radical.

I think good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess. You don't actually consummate it, but you get to pretend, imagine what it would be like.

I was never a joiner. I tried - I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago... I guess I wasn't a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as I'm still here - but I'm only a binge socialite.