If you are an autodidact, you probably do write more in the rhythm of speech rather than having learnt prose.
— Viv Albertine
I didn't have many role models or interesting women to get stirred up by until Yoko Ono came along.
If you've written something that moves you and frightens you, you just can't take it back.
When I was pregnant, I prayed that my daughter would have brown, green, or grey eyes.
You've got one life: find your voice within it.
There's a fine line between brave and mad. But whatever I do, I go for it.
My favourite guitar was - I can't remember if it was '50s or '60s - a pale wood Telecaster, and it made me a better player. It was beautiful, so easy to play.
I think, often, people who do something new creatively don't benefit financially from it - it's the people who come after and make them palatable that make money.
If my 18-year-old daughter asked me whether she should lead a truth-hunting, artistic, uncompromising life as I have done, I'd say no, don't do it. It's a difficult and lonely path for a woman.
I can't stand these autobiographies that start with, you know, 'I was born in Acton, and I went to such and such a school.' They just bore me.
I have a daughter. I have my imagination. I have friends. I, in no way, am going to louse that up with some idiot man, frankly. They drag you down - I'm talking about my generation of men.
Female rage is not often acknowledged - never mind written about - so one of the questions I'm asking is, 'Are you allowed to be this angry as you grow older as a woman?' But I'm also trying to trace where my anger came from. Who made me the person that is still so raw and angry? I think that it's empowering to ask that question.
I've had to fight for everything.
I think sometimes men find it easier to be a carer than an accessory. I mean, most women I know in bands are pretty lonely. Guys don't want to travel around with you. I know loads of women who do it, but guys don't do it. They're not brought up for it.
I hate to say it, but one of the worst things you could be called when I was younger was unfeminine.
I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.
I can always go back to Jane Austen. 'Mansfield Park' is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.
I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.
I could be completely mad and sound like David Icke, but I just find people with blue eyes colder, less passionate, and more calculated people.
Both my parents lived through a world war. My grandparents lived through two world wars. And they didn't go around saying, 'Look for happiness.'
In the 1970s, girls didn't do anything. It wasn't their fault. For me and the other working-class girls I hung around with, our route was plotted - you were a secretary and a wife. I wanted to hitchhike around the world, go on motorbikes, be in bands.
I haven't found music comforting since the '80s, but it doesn't mean it's not good - it just doesn't work for me. It's shocking to me because music was my religion from the age of 11, and it's like I don't believe in my god any more.
The older I get, the more the lying, the losing touch with your true thoughts and feelings, and the compromises required to fit in seem not worth the effort. It's my one go on Earth; why spend any more of it conforming to other people's rules and ideals?
I've never had any interest in reading the real-life stories of criminals. I don't want to get inside their heads.
Girl bands still do just copy the way men move onstage. To me, that is so backwards, so un-radical.
We were very deliberately not playing 12-bar structures, blues structures, which rock musicians turned into such a cliche. We tried to... listen to the rhythms within ourselves and take the normal words we used every day in our normal thoughts, which girls hadn't written about before.
When you've fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.
Doctors didn't know if I would survive. The cancer was too big to operate on, so they blitzed it with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Look at Kate Bush, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono - three really private people, but when they're on stage or when they're singing, they let go like no one else.
There was an angry wave in the '70s, a strong feminist angry wave. I remember thinking - oh my God - I thought it was the beginning of something, and it all went quiet.
I like to smell a book before I start it. I fold over the pages, write comments in the margins, leave it on the bed next to my pillow when I fall asleep.
I think I function well in most parts of my life but possibly not in that emotional side of my life.
My mother was so ignorant of what could have befallen me and was probably so exhausted - she was one of the first generation of single parents as well - that it was all a bit overwhelming. So the naivety of parents meant we did have a certain amount of freedom.
It's all very well for the Kinks and Damon Albarn to sing those songs and sneer at Mr. Nine to Five, but again, they're white men, so they didn't have it very hard.
I didn't pursue happiness at all. I've never pursued it. I wasn't brought up to pursue it.
There are more and more of us women out there who won't be pushed around and will give back a lot more than was bargained for. You have to mean it, though.
With the second book, I didn't have an ideal reader in mind, as it developed quite out of my control, this detective novel of why am I so full of anger, why did I pick up a guitar when I was poor and uneducated.
I've burned all my bridges for the sake of getting as near as I can to the truth. And after years of searching for the truth, you find that that's all you can bear. The truth and nothing but the truth.
I think young men and boys are taught to fail. It's nothing to them; they do sport, they fall over, they shout, 'I'm all right,' and carry on. But with girls, they're so appallingly embarrassed to fail, it's like it's considered unfeminine.
I feel sorry for girls getting caught up in it and still thinking they have to define themselves and their success by being in a relationship, straight women, straight girls, by being in a heterosexual relationship or being in any relationship, as if that's in any way a mark of what kind of successful human being you are.
I want to say to younger women especially that it's OK to be an outsider. It's OK to admit to your rage. You're not the only person walking down the street feeling angry inside.
I'm still angry at so much - class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.
The more blows you have in life, the better, because it means you're challenging yourself.
We used to have massively long discussions about how we should stand on stage. Should we stand with our legs apart? No, all the guys with guitars in skinny jeans stand with their legs apart, and you'd think, 'We can't stand like that.' We'd spend hours and hours, days and days, discussing how to stand.
People say you mellow as you get older, and I really haven't.
