Quotes About Youth

My son has followed fashion since he was a punk. He and I agree that fashion is about sex.

My daughter, Anna, is almost 15, and my son, Ben, is almost 10.

I spend a lot of time at my son's school and I really wanted to do a movie that the kids could see. The good thing about being my age and not having to be the ingenue anymore is that I get to be a mom. I get to have kids in my movies.

I knew what could happen to my son if he was sent to the wrong school and got in with the wrong crowd.

We got to see Sondheim shows, 'Phantom of the Opera,' 'Cats' and all sorts of stuff. When you're 10 or 11 years old, it's just magnificent. The story-telling, the music - it lifts you out of your seat.

'Friday' is about hanging out with friends, having fun. I felt like it was my personality in that song.

My 9-year-old daughter can recite every line from 'Easy Rider,' and that is not an easy song to do. She raps all of Nicki Minaj and everything; she's dope. She has my musical ear for sure. She sings, and she's beautiful. It's very powerful.

Many pop songs seem to be more potent now than in their heyday.

I got a lot of experience for my age. Some artists might take a line or two from a bunch of songs and snip it together and make something, but everything I say I do.

Since I was growing up, I liked love songs - Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke. That was the kind of songs getting the girls dancing.

When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went - songs she loved, like 'Begin the Beguine' by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.

When I was 12 years old and first decided I wanted to be a songwriter, the people that I always looked up to were Rodgers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, and people like that.

I'd had three husbands by 23. The second was a songwriter who couldn't handle the fact the little lady was doing better than him.

As a songwriter, I do kind of look at 'Santa Monica' as a thing outside of itself, because it isn't just my song. This is a song a lot of people tell me is a part of their high school or college years. That means a lot to me.

I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl - long before I was a musician and a songwriter.

So many songwriters peak in their early 20s because they're living off their passions.

I love to give the song away - it's so exciting - where, I think, a lot of younger songwriters, they struggle with that. And it's a big struggle, where they want the shine and they want people to know that it was their idea and it was their doing. But luckily, I've been through that, so I can just focus on helping other people do their thing.

The Internet has changed how young people listen to music. Television programs like 'American Idol' changed how people listen to music. It was no longer the songwriters that we celebrated; it was the singers.

In the past, being young, I might have been standoffish to working with other songwriters.

I started quite late. I only discovered that I could write a song when I was, like, 17... some musicians, they're starting out, writing songs when they're, like, 12, 13. I never thought I would go into songwriting when I was that young.

I bought a Three Dog Night album when I was pretty young, and I remember listening to all those songs. That's just greatly crafted songwriting, and the songs have such great harmonies. I remember marveling over those and trying to figure them out on piano. That was my early education - figuring out records, older records, as a kid.

I learned classical guitar as a kid at about 7 or 8 years old. When I was about 14, I started dabbling in songwriting. That's when I got into the folky singer-songwriter style.

When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and 'Sonic the Hedgehog' became very dear to me.

One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.