Van Gogh was impulsive.

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.

Drag wasn't always counterculture.

My parents told me I'd point to a bed of flowers and say 'Pink. Pretty,' before I knew any other words.

I'm a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that's the nature of the work I do.

America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye.

I learned a woman is never an old woman.

I conceived in art college at the age of 20, near the end of term.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

I couldn't see passion as a bad thing.

I'd had a rough childhood.

My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

I certainly don't want to be an angry old artist.

The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back.

White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time.

I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.

I believe that I am male and I am female.

In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in the people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here in Los Angeles, there are less characters because they're all inside automobiles.

I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

When you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished... that's kind of disappointing.

We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers.

I hate show business.

Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.

I can't remember anything I ever wrote.

With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.

There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

The coming of the kids hasn't come out in my art yet.

I used to be monastic, almost. Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.

I don't like to make fluffy little songs, but now I want to make some light songs.

I'm not a pitiable creature. It's just that I suffer very eloquently.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

I'm a night owl.

I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshiped or spat out.

My first four albums covered the usual youth problems - looking for love in all the wrong places - while the next five are basically about being in your 30s.

The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music.

I lost my daughter at 21. I had to give her up because I was broke, no place to take her, no money to take her. That was very traumatic.

My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.

If I'm censoring for anyone, it's for my parents. They are very old-fashioned and moral people. They still don't understand me that well.

I do have this reputation for being a serious person.

I love to dance.

People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me - they're too personal.