I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.
David Bowie
Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.
The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.
I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.
Fame itself... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.
When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.
I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.
I re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.
I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.
Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.
On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.
Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.
As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.
Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.
I feel confident imposing change on myself. It's a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That's why I need to throw curve balls.
As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.
That's the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God - so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true... Hell, don't pose me that one.
I don't see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.
A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.
It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.
It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.
I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me.
Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.
I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.
Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.
I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.
I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.
I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.
Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.
You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.
I'm an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.
There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.
I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.
I change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.
What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.
I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.
When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.
What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That's what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.
Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.
All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.
Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'
I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.
I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.
For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.
