I have no interest in being a trained ballerina. People should dance how they want to dance. I want to be the funky chicken..

Writing should be like skirts. Long enough to cover what it needs to cover and short enough to maintain interest..

Fashion costs money, but songs are free. You can write them for free and you can sing them for free and they can infect those around you or the peopl….

The whole exploitation thing is funny, too. Exploitation is the nature of the world, isn't it?.

Most book things now (with a few exceptions) are just built around nice, safe books written for nice and safe book club readers. These are usually th….

We're artists. We cry out to be exploited on some level. Write a dissertation on my work. Write a biography about me..

In memoir, can you really tell the truth about yourself? You're not going to write about your little peccadilloes, like, "I like a finger in my ass d….

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and ….

Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain. Mark Twain is Mark Twain. He doesn't become the thing until he creates himself..

This [Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original] is another one of those books with the perfect blend of anecdote and analysis. The….

Everybody is so sure about everything these days. Just look at your horrible Facebook feed on the most recent tragedy that people are commenting on..

There's always tons of crap music people are trying to sell us - [it's] the same way with publishers and galleries..

It's weird. People want you to know that they write. They want you to know they're a musician, rather than making music or making stories. It's the s….

The things that I have loved have always been those extremes where there has been some kind of apocalypse in the person's life, and they come out uns….

The only hope we have are our bodies. We're all trapped in them and we all hate them, and it's this reason why we're comic and not tragic..

I think maybe it's my personality. People don't like my face..

I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It’s just a painting..

I guess the things I have always loved are from people who were just being themselves. They were doing these things because they couldn't do it any o….

There was a lot of tension between my dad and his mother and brothers. Sometimes when I was over there, I remember thinking, "I don't want to get sho….

I think all good art is outsider art..

Everybody is so goddamn sure of themselves, it just makes you realize this is the curse of the modern world..