Every passage
worth remembering.

Our band could be your life.

You could jam econo with your rock group — you could jam econo on your job, in your buying habits, in your whole way of living.

The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid. You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.

You don't get anywhere by pretending to be a big shot. You accomplish things by working within your means, and by keeping as much control of your own existence as possible.

It was like our record could have been a hobo pissing in the forest for all the impact it had.

Personal purifying is the beginning of everything. Once you get your own shit together, once you get your own mind together, it makes life for you and the people around you so much more agreeable and understandable.

Implicit in Beat Happening's music was a dare: If you saw them and said, “Even I could do better than that,” then the burden was on you to prove it. If you did, you had yourself a band, and if you didn't, you had to shut up.

I looked at it like it was the punk Lennon and McCartney.

When does the Hip Hop Generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us it's over.

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

Generations are fictions. The act of determining a group of people by imposing a beginning and ending date around them is a way to impose a narrative.

It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction.

Hip-hop is the voice of this generation. Even if you didn't grow up in the Bronx in the '70s, hip-hop is there for you.

It's not so easy writing about nothing.

Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.

All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.

In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.

One afternoon while crossing the street I noticed I was crying. But I could not identify the source of my tears. The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth.

My table, flanked by the coffee machine and the front window, affords me a sense of privacy, where I withdraw into my own atmosphere.

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose.

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.

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it.

Most of the other performers tried to put themselves across, rather than the song, but I didn't care about doing that. With me, it was about putting the song across.

It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot.

You can write a song anywhere, in a railroad compartment, on a boat, on horseback — it helps to be moving. Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving.

I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs.

There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment.

When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

People pay money to see others believe in themselves.

The only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don't fall to your death.

In general, though, women aren't really allowed to be kick-ass. It's like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening.

In retrospect, that's why I joined a band, so I could be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.

Brilliant, manipulative, sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate.

Like most new moms, I found that no matter how just and shared you expect the experience to be, or how equal the man thinks parenting should be, it isn't. It can't be. Most child-raising falls on women's shoulders.

I never wanted to be a housewife. I never wanted to be anything other than who I was.

I know, it sounds like I'm someone else entirely now, and I guess I am.

Hardcore is about limits — shorter, simpler, more speed, more volume — whereas breakbeats and hip hop are all about the limitless.

We just assumed that because Licensed to Ill sold a billion copies, Paul's Boutique would do the same. But, like, it didn't.

We got so caught up with making fun of that rock-star persona that we became that persona. Became what we hated.

At a certain point pretty early on, enough crazy stuff had already happened that we realized that all we do have, before this started and after it ends, is the three of us.

This was our last album because Adam got cancer and died. If that hadn't happened, we would probably be making a new record as you read this.

A good path to creating something mediocre is having rigid rules for what you're making and how you're making it.

The big discovery late in 1968 or early 1969 was when I started playing the open five-string tuning. It transformed my life. It’s the way of playing that I use for the riffs and songs the Stones are best known for — “Honky Tonk Women,” “Brown Sugar,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Happy,” “All Down the Line,” “Start Me Up” and “Satisfaction.”

The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you’ve only got three notes — the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart.

I could kick smack; I couldn’t kick music.

You’re sitting with some guys, and you’re playing and you go, “Ooh, yeah!” That feeling is worth more than anything. There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings.

It’s not only the high quality of the drugs I had that I attribute my survival to. I was very meticulous about how much I took. I’d never put more in to get a little higher. That’s where most people fuck up on drugs. It’s the greed involved that never really affected me.

If you don’t know the blues... there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

First you’ve got to know that fucker. And you go to bed with it. If there’s no babe around, you sleep with it. She’s just the right shape.

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It’s the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: “He passed it on.”

When I fell in with Gram Parsons in the summer of 1968, I struck a seam of music that I’m still developing, which widened the range of everything I was playing and writing. It also began an instant friendship that already seemed ancient the first time we sat down and talked.

Gram taught me country music — how it worked, the difference between the Bakersfield style and the Nashville style. He played it all on the piano — Merle Haggard, “Sing Me Back Home,” George Jones, Hank Williams. I learned piano from Gram and started writing songs on it.

It was the beginning of the Eighties when Mick started to become unbearable.

But I’m not here just to make records and money. I’m here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: “Do you know this feeling?”

I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

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

I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers.

I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined.

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad... We contained opposing principles, light and dark.

The city was a real city, shifty and sexual.

When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.

Suddenly he looked up and said, “Patti, did art get us?” I looked away... “I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know.” Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work.

To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention... Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression.

The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment. Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves.

This content does not come from inside us. It comes through us. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available.

If you’ve truly created an innovative work, it’s likely to alienate as many people as it attracts. The best art divides the audience. If everyone likes it, you probably haven’t gone far enough.

Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.

Art is choosing to do something skillfully, caring about the details, bringing all of yourself to make the finest work you can. It is beyond ego, vanity, self-glorification, and need for approval.

Self-doubt lives in all of us. And while we may wish it gone, it’s there to serve us... You can doubt your way to excellence.

The reason to finish is to start something new.

Most variables are completely out of our control. The only ones we can control are doing our best work, sharing it, starting the next, and not looking back.

Holding every rule as breakable is a healthy way to live as an artist.

Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.

I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.

In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us.

In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever.

Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic... it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in, and the tailoring process... is largely unconscious, instinctive. We usually don’t even notice it.

How music works is determined by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like.

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike.

I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological makeup and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common.

I begin by improvising a melody over the music. I do this by singing nonsense syllables, but with weirdly inappropriate passion, given that I’m not saying anything.

It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves — they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

Individual imagination is not enough. Without an ecosystem, there can be no musical miracle.

A lot of people thought it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around... but that’s absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open.

The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.

The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

The pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all.

Candy didn’t want to be a perfect woman — that would be too simple... What she wanted was to be a woman with all the little problems that a woman has to deal with — runs in her stocking, runny mascara, men that left her... as if the more real she could make the little problems, the less real the big one... would be.

The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail... The doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room.

One afternoon when she called, we were in the middle of shooting a sequence for “I, A Man,” so I said why didn’t she come over and be in the movie and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a handout... she was actually funny and that was that.

I said “No! No, Valerie! Don’t do it!” and she shot at me again. I dropped down to the floor as if I’d been hit... she moved in closer, fired again, and then I felt horrible, horrible pain, like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.

The greatest feeling I ever had in my life — with my clothes on — was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1944.

Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn’t about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

I’ve changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?

For me, music and life are all about style.

But you’ve got to have style in whatever you do — writing, music, painting, fashion, boxing, anything.

I got my looks from my mother and also my love of clothes and sense of style.

Being rebellious and black, a nonconformist, being cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean, whatever else you want to call it — I was all those things and more.

A person is lucky if he has one soldier or Gil Evans in his life, someone close enough to pull your coattail when something’s gone wrong.

When I tell people that I missed what I was trying to do on Kind of Blue, that I missed getting the exact sound of the African finger piano up in that sound, they just look at me like I’m crazy.

Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

I was born May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois... I was named after my father; he was named after his father. That made me Miles Dewey Davis III, but everybody in my family called me Junior.

You are not doomed by your genes and hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life.

Your body believes every word you say.

When you believe in your future, you can begin to live in your future.

The placebo response is the body's ability to heal itself when given the right environment, the right belief, and the right expectation.

A thought, when repeated and felt long enough, becomes a belief, and a belief becomes a state of being.

When you change your beliefs, you change your biology.

You don't need to know the how — you only need to be clear on the what and the why.

The diagnosis is not the prognosis.

It's not the affirmation that creates the change. It's the elevated emotion that creates the change.

The hardest thing about change is wanting it more than you want what is familiar.

Belief is a thought you keep thinking — until you can't imagine thinking otherwise.

The body is the unconscious mind, and it does not know the difference between an event in the world and an event in the imagination.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.

What is to give light must endure burning.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Resistance will unfailingly point to true north — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.

The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.

Don't cheat the muse. She knows.

The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time.

Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us.

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality. Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us.