I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it.

The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

But I have a tremendous will to live and a tremendous 'joie de vivre,' alternating with irritability.

My family could only afford to get me the box of eight Crayola crayons, but I craved the one with all 24 colours. I wanted magenta and turquoise and silver and gold.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

I'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.

I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.

The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.

My childhood was very difficult. I had every childhood disease and then some, but my parents didn't mollycoddle me. They left me to fight those battles on my own. I guess that was very Canadian, very stoic. But it's good. I had to become a warrior. I had to give up hope and find a substitute for hope that would be far more stable.

To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.

I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.

It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.

My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.

You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n' roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn't roll. He has got no swing in him.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

I see bodies as individual things.

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.

My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.

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.