I kind of love that there's not really a feminist canon; or maybe there is, but it's being changed, that it's a constantly moving canon in the feminist blogosphere. I love that.

It used to be that if you had a pretty good record, you could stop by a station in Little Rock or Atlanta and let the DJ listen to it. No way something like that can happen now.

I believe that hundreds of years from now, history will be divided into pre-1960s and post-1960s.

If you are born in 1564, your dislocation from your parents' experience is very profound. You are the first generation who will have had all your religious experience in English, the first to have a...

Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.

In the latter half of the last century, the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

Synthesizers were looked at as stealing the soul of music, but then there were these new bands who used it to contradict that idea.

Jacksonville back in the 1960s was kind of a redneck town. There were only two or three places where you could play our kind of hard rock - or 'hippie music' as it was called back then. You had to go...

If humans want to see the same types of people over and over, that's what industries will give us. If we want to see something different, that's what they'll have to give us.

The 1920s was the beginning of the media age. For the first time people were taking influences from the radio, Vogue and Hollywood.

You have to have a cultural ethic that allows for making mistakes. It cannot be that just because you make mistakes, you're out. You have to make mistakes in order to innovate.

The only one that got through was Jimmy Walker, because he plays the gas station attendant. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just that we were kind of purists at the time, and we didn't...

In the 1950s, when we went to Lord's, you had to sit down, and it was very prim and proper. It was only in the 1960s when we started to do well that West Indians started voicing their opinions.

Music became less understandable in the wake of the new MTV era. You weren't supposed to be anything other than a pop star, to not go deeper than that. It was really strange. It was suffocating,...

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.

Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.

Certainly there's a huge appeal to the '60s, because it was such a big turning point to everyone. It was the era of change, the boiling point. People rebelled against things - the hippies, the...

Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in...

When rock came along the lyrics and melodies became less important and it bothered me to think that perhaps they might not regain the value they have to music - they are music.

You can ride your bike to anywhere in Portland if you want to. I think there was a charming underdog mentality when I first moved here in the late '80s that is definitely gone. People acted more like...

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

Things are more complex today, and I think humor has changed a great deal. People are more sensitive today.

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest...

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

We undress men and women, we don't dress them any more.

Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.

Back in the day, you could have a crap gig, and nobody would film you. Now, everybody's got an iPhone - you have a bad day, and it's going on the Internet.

Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.