Women Guitarists

"And when they ask me, "What are you looking at?" I always answer, "Nothing much" (Not much)"

"The light and sweet coffee color of her skin"

"By day give thanks By night beware Half the world in sweetness The other in fear"

"In America you watch TV and think that's totally unreal, then you step outside and it's just the same."

"Round off the edges Talk us down from the ledges Give us strength to try once more Baby, that's what love is for That's what love is for"

"Sometimes I see you And you don't know why I'm there And I'm washed away by emotions I hold deep down inside Getting stronger with time It's living through the fire And holding on we find That's what love is for …"

"Believing in the one thing That has gotten us this far — That's what love is for To help us through it That's what love is for Nothing else can do it Melt our defenses Bring us back to our senses Give us strength to try once more Baby, that's what love is for."

"True love is frozen in time I'll be your champion and you'll be mine I will remember you So please remember I will remember you"

"I'm going down Follow if you want I won't just hang around Like you'll show me where to go I'm already out Of foolproof ideas So don't ask me how To get started It's all uncharted"

"I wanna darken in the skies Open the floodgates up I wanna change my mind I wanna be enough I want the water in my eyes I wanna cry until the end of time I wanna let the rain come down Make a brand new ground"

"They may be lies But say that we'll be alright If we stay tonight"

"Who cares if you disagree? You are not me Who made you king of anything? So you dare Tell me who to be Who died and made you king of anything?"

"So how do you do it? With just words and just music Capture the feeling That my earth is somebody's ceiling Can I deliver in sound The weight of the ground of a cemetery in the center of Queens"

"You are all just perfect little satellites Spinning round and round this broken Earthy life"

"I've got my little black dress on And if I tell myself that nothing's wrong This doesn't have to be a sad song Not with my little black dress on."

"A tongue like yours should be burned and branded So I can see you lie to me I wish the air would color red when you breathed it Oh, so I could've seen it coming Look in my eyes when you say you love me So I can see you lie to me"

"There's no way to make the pain play fair It doesn't disappear just because you say it isn't there"

"It can't be a mistake If I just call it change"

"I would die to make you mine Bleed me dry almost every time But I don't mind, no I don't mind it I would come back 1000 times"

"You said Remember that life is Not meant to be wasted We can always be chasing the sun So fill up your lungs and just—run! We can always be chasing the sun"

"You can have Manhattan I know it's for the best Gather up the avenues and leave them on your doorstep"

"Tell the world that we finally got it all right I choose you I will become yours and you will become mine I choose you."

"Mean songs are still better than going postal"

"Maybe nobody loved you when you were young Maybe, boy, when you cry nobody ever comes Will you try it once? Give up the machine gun"

"I say what I think Because it's more economic than drugs or a drink"

"I don't care For your fairytales You're so worried about the maiden Oh, you know she's only waiting on the next best thing"

"Ooh, how'm I gonna get over you? I'll be alright Just not tonight But someday"

"Here I am And I stand So tall Just the way I'm supposed to be But you're on to me And all over me"

"Set me free Leave me be I dont wanna fall another moment into your gravity"

"The time that I've taken I pray is not wasted Have I already tasted My piece of one sweet love"

"I'll be alright Once I find the other side Of someday"

"I wonder what would happen if you Say what you want to say And let the words fall out Honestly, I want to see you be brave"

"We choose convenience over individuality every time—every time."

"I'm all for putting money back into the black community, who white people have been stealing from for years."

"I finally learned from Fred Durst, who is [of] my generation, that "selling out" means every ticket at The Forum got sold. I don't think Britney [Spears] and Christina [Aguilera] sit there agonizing over their record sales. The [term] "sell out" needs to be eradicated from the language, because if you don't "sell out," guess what? An asshole will."

"My brother, Toby, is six-foot-six, [and] he [went to] Vassar; my other brother, Brown; my sister, without one penny from me or my [step]dad, NYU Law, number one in her class—Jesus, it's such a functional family, I don't know where I came from."

"Since I’ve basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I’m not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don’t care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do. … I’m looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I’m not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It’s a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system."

"[Crack] used to be called freebase when white rich people did it. Then it got sold in batches, and white rich people were still doing it, and it was still called freebase. And then all of a sudden this guy named Ricky Freeway Ross started making it and he happened to be black, and— everything is political— and, then it turned into "crack.""

"I'll always prefer to play with women and hang out with women, and I'll always be a feminist. But let me tell you something. Gloria Steinem never helped me out; Larry Flynt did."

"Releasing those songs into the void, and not having the void answer back, led all of us to splinter off and attempt to make our mark by deconstructing. Instead of going forward with my tunesmithing, I went back to the beginning. And that’s what Pretty on the Inside was about. I said, ‘I’m not going to follow any of the songwriting values that I’ve been learning for a good seven years. Instead, I’m going to set up on my own land and make my own stake, and see where it goes.’ And the next place that takes me is Seattle, where what was happening was so heavy, and so intense."

"Without the benefit of history, there was no way you could be in the middle of all that and understand what it was like. To be a couple that persecuted, and to be such weak people, so frail and reactive, huddling together because the whole world is going [she makes a sound like a bomb going off]. You’ve got your own team, the sectarian left, splintering off and pointing accusing fingers. We’re fucking picking nits off Eddie Vedder and Eddie Vedder is trying to take on the constitution, and the whole fucking world is damning me to the stake. It was insanity. So in reaction to that, I made a record about it."

"Even though I now feel more confident and happy, I was really paranoid for about a year and a half. Basically, what happened was that I quit taking drugs and I walked out into the world and was sort of in this film that was really well received. So, after years of living a more destructive lifestyle, I had to, instantly, kind of court this world which had incredibly nice value systems, but with protocols that I had never encountered before. And then I had to reconcile these two worlds. You know—I want to live a happier, more productive lifestyle, but the question was, did I want to renounce being in a great rock ’n’ roll band for that? The answer was ‘No way.’"

"I used to see media on Althea [Flynt] and she was very wild looking. She had a mohawk and she published Hustler—I thought that was crazy. But when you study her, she was so innocent and frail and sort of birdlike, and sweet. She stayed sweet until she died, but I don't know what happened for her to get into drugs or the things she got into."

"I wore a dress that was so restricting and shoes that were five inches high, I could barely stage-dive. Then I got the best write-ups, for being feminine, I guess. I couldn’t move well and I was restrained, which equals great review. That’s pretty horrid."

"The deal with fashion is that proletariat male rock critics have a real Bruce Springsteen problem with denim boomer issues. We as females have thousands and thousands of years of fashion in our DNA. We want to wear nice fucking clothes—it's part of what we do, so I don't have an issue with it. If you have an opportunity to go to the Oscars in a fabulous gown, you're gonna fucking take it. I don't have to listen to a rule. Who made that rule? Some dumb guy."

"Do you remember when you were young, and you’d stare at someone on-stage and think ‘Oh my God—he looked right at me?’ I do, so I have this kind of rescue-fantasy thing. When I see kids in the audience I think, ‘Okay, that’s me, and it would be kind of cool if the person on-stage would come down and save me.’ I’m not going to be able to save every one of them, but I’ll do my best, because I genuinely like kids. If I didn’t have my lust for my art, I probably would have ended up working with them."

"Look, you've got these highly intelligent imperious girls, but who told them it was their undeniable American right not to be offended? Being offended is part of being in the real world. I'm offended every time I see George Bush on TV! And, frankly, it wasn't very good music."

"I didn't ever really talk until I started hanging out in '80 or '81 with the drag queens at the Metropolis [or Met, a gay new wave club] in Portland. I was very, very quiet. So much so that at one point when I was very young I was diagnosed as a probable autistic. And then I started hanging around with bitchy drag queens and with [my friends] Ursula and Robin, and they basically raised me. I found my inner bitch and I ran with her."

"My goal keeps me alive, and no personal issue is going to interfere with that. If people try to put me in the crazy box–'crazy fucking Courtney'–go ahead. But if you think you’re going to stop me from where I’m going, you’re not going to do it. I work my ass off. I deliver the goddamn goods. And I will deliver them again."

"With me and Kurt, it was either Bonnie and Clyde, Sid and Nancy, or mommy. That's where it got at the end, but the rest of the time it was equal. The equality was based on Bonnie and Clyde, which is fucking goddamn fun. And Romeo and Juliet. But it was also Hamlet and Hamlet. Not Hamlet and Ophelia. These two fucking Hamlets sitting around."