Great Throughts Treasury

"Got to lose control before you take control."

"Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person."

"He contained, even at an early age, a stirring and the desire to stir."

"He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language."

"Glitter in their eyes."

"He just became a member of the family. My girls just took to him, and he took to them."

"He took me in skeptically. Darling, the ensemble is fabulous, he said, patting my hand, eyeing my black jacket, black tie, black silk shirt, and heavily pegged black satin pants, but I'm not so sure about the white sneakers. But they're essential to my costume. Your costume? What are you dressed as? A tennis player in mourning."

"He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. This one has the magic, he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us."

"He waited for me, and as we headed towards the subway he said, ?One day we?ll go in together and the work will be ours.?"

"He wasn't certain whether he was a good or bad person. Whether he was altruistic. Whether he was demonic. But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize."

"Heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal howl says it all...notes pour into the caste of freedom...the freedom to be intense...to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. To break from the long bonds of servitude-ruthless adoration of the celestial shepherd. let us celebrate our own flesh-to embrace not one?s race mais the marathon-to never let go of the fiery sadness called desire."

"He's so humble, and he is always willing to do whatever you ask him to do."

"Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man."

"He [piano player Richard Sohl] was nineteen, classically trained, yet he possessed the simplicity of a truly confident musician who did not need to show off his knowledge. He was as happy playing a repetitive three-chord sequence as a Beethoven sonata."

"Holding onto the naive belief that travel will open."

"Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you're communicating with people, and you're not in a void. On the other hand, because you're always creating and transforming, art always separates you - always."

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

"I absolutely remember where I was when I first heard it. It got me through adolescence."

"I always enjoyed doing transgender songs."

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

"I did not comprehend and I often wonder what he ever saw in me, and it has taken me all these years to understand."

"He took twelve pictures that day."

"I didn't know Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, but I was affected by both of their deaths because I admired their work so much and mourned their youth and work they would never produce."

"I didn't really expect it to go anywhere."

"I didn't see myself as gifted enough to do the work, but I did think I could stir things up enough to wake people and maybe inspire those who had the greatness and should be working."

"I didn't think I was all of a sudden going to start doing poetry readings, or make a record and have a rock 'n' roll band."

"I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work."

"I am not really certain how original my contribution to music is as I am obviously an amateur."

"I didn?t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wished to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it."

"I didn't begin my life in 1975 with 'Horses.' I recorded 'Horses' in 1975, but was drawing in Paris in 1969."

"I don't expect a big crowd. But hopefully if this first meeting is interesting the word will spread."

"I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future."

"I don't like categorizing stuff, but women's roles all through history have been to act as hierophant or someone who's guarded the secrets or guarded the temple. I'm a girl doing what guys usually did, the way that I look, the goals and kinds of things I want to help achieve through rock. It's more heroic stuff and heroic stuff has been traditionally male. Like Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all those people. I mean, Jim Morrison was trying to elevate the word; he was the poet in rock & roll before me. He was an academic poet. Lou Reed -- another academic poet. I'm more like down-to-earth than them guys"

"I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off."

"I don't think the area of Jerusalem should be part of a Jewish state; it belongs to all people, to Christians and Muslims and the Jewish people."

"I don't stay in one discipline because it's more lucrative than another. In fact, the most successful thing I ever did was 'Just Kids,' for which I had absolutely no expectations."

"I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change."

"I don't think public life in and of itself can destroy you. I think it's the way people react to it, and some people are more sturdy than others... I don't think any one faction can be blamed for a person's self-destruction - a certain amount of that has to be innate."

"I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender."

"I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can?t say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would be possible, yet I harbored that conceit."

"I don't think, he insisted. I feel."

"I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf."

"I gave you a wrist watch, baby, and you wouldn't even give me the time of day."

"I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cort‚s."

"I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife."

"I found solace in Arthur Rimbaud, in which I had come across at sixteen, on a book stall in front of the bus station in Philadelphia; his eyes had crossed my stuffy from the cover of Illuminations . He possessed a defiant able to inflame, and I had received as a compatriot, a relative, even a secret love. Not having the ninety-nine cents to buy the book myself I was put in his pocket."

"I had a lot of thinking to do about the direction I should be taking. I wondered if I was doing the right work. Was it all frivolity?"

"I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me."

"I had to learn, really, how to rein in my energies and discipline myself. And I found it very useful. I rebelled against it at first, but it's a good thing to have."

"I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one."