I believe that I am male and I am female.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I'd had a rough childhood.

I couldn't see passion as a bad thing.

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

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

I learned a woman is never an old woman.

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

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

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

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

Drag wasn't always counterculture.

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.

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

Van Gogh was impulsive.

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.

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

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