(Do you ever make yourself cry when you write?) No, never. I’m not a weeper. I’m a snarler. I just put all the weeping in the words. The words are th… - Joni Mitchell

I wanna be strong, I wanna laugh along, I wanna belong to the living. Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive, Wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive.

Truth and beauty. That’s what I hope to deliver.

I don’t think of myself as confessional. That’s a name that was put on me. The confessional poets like [Sylvia] Plath, whom I read later when they started calling me confessional, most of their stuff seemed contrived to me and not as greatly honest as it was touted to be. I never wanted to act the part of the poet, with pearls of language and wisdom falling from my lips...I’ve always used the songwriting process as a self-analysis of sorts. Like the Blue album – people were kind of shocked at the intimacy. It was peculiar in the pop arena at that time, because you were supposed to portray yourself as bigger than life. I remember thinking, “Well, if they’re going to worship me, they should know who they’re worshiping.”