"For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life."

"An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God."

"Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man. The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times."

"In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth."

"And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands."

"Observing people taking in the work I had watched Robert create was an emotional experience. It had left our private world. It was what I had always wanted for him, but I felt a slight pang of possessiveness sharing it with others. Overriding that feeling was the joy of seeing Robert's face, suffused with confirmation, as he glimpsed the future he had so resolutely sought and had worked so hard to achieve."

"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."

"The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication."

"No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist."

"I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works."

"I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment."

"I come from a real working class background, and I didn't know anyone sophisticated - except I saw Edie Sedgewick once at the Art Museum in Philly. She had these black leotards and little black pumps and this big ermine cape and all these white dogs and black sunglasses and black eyes. She was classy!"

"He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us.Neither are you.Neither am I."

"I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can't see today. Patti, I don't know anything."

"Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting."

"I paced while he slept, ricocheting like a dove skidding the lonely confines of a Joseph Cornell box."

"Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words."

"My mom loved rock 'n roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around."

"And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire."

"Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all."

"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."

"Horses pretty much broke as a record in England."

"I have great respect for my parents. I got such beautiful things from both of them. It doesn't mean that we didn't have our rough times, but they were remarkable people who were open-minded, creative and hard-working, and had great senses of humor."

"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."

"We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow."

"Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional."

"How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised that I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human engel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water."

"Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!"

"An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch."

"My mother answers all my fan mail."

"Rock n' roll is dream soup, what's your brand?"

"The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan."

"I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children."

"In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen - a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children - I learned a lot."

"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."

"I always enjoyed doing transgender songs."

"I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do."

"The thing is that as you grow through life, the pursuit of art and the pursuit of new ideas, all these things keeps your mind elastic."

"William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He'd appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway."

"My dad got a job in a factory in Philadelphia, so I was raised in Germantown in a sort of a barracks for soldiers. They had housing for temporary housing. And then my parents saved money and bought a little house in South Jersey, built on a swamp."

"If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer."

"It's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive."

"We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world."

"I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission."

"Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself."

"I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll."

"I've always thrived on the encouragement of others."

"Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about."

"First of all, anybody who has lasted 30 and went through the 60's is really a survivor."

"I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,that Joplin had the last drunken throat,that Morrison had the last enlightened mind."