Quotes

I'm not a woman, I'm a force of nature.

"I'm not going to hurt anybody other than that dick who keeps writing songs about me" --about Dave Grohl in a Howard Stern interview.

"Cocaine is like really evil coffee." (What she told her daughter about drugs.)

"You're no one in the rock industry unless you've feuded with me or slept with Winona Ryder.

"Being famous is just like being in high school. But, I'm not interested in being the cheerleader. I'm not interested in being Gwen Stefani. She's the cheerleader, and I'm out in the smoker shed. And plenty of you are out there in the smoker shed too. When it comes to rock 'n' roll, it's just like high school" (From an interview in the August 2004 Seventeen magazine).

"Knowing me, I'd probably end up at a bar, asking some guy to get me another martini. Still bleaching my hair at 59." (her response to what she thinks she'll be like when she's old.)

[on the changing state of the music industry] It's a radical time for musicians, a really revolutionary time, and I believe revolutions [like Napster] are a lot more fun than cash, which, by the way, we don't have at major labels anyway, so we might as well get with it and get in the game.

If I write a song about being a teenage prostitute, that doesn't mean that I was a teenage prostitute, any more than it means Kurt raped Polly.

Drugs have nothing to do with the creation of music. In fact, they are dumb and self indulgent. Kind of like sucking your thumb.

[on her father] He managed the Grateful Dead for five seconds, and he was an amateur acid-maker.

I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father. Now I'm trying to really appreciate and like men more.

I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what The Velvet Underground was to music- it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.

If you treat a girl like a dog, she's going to piss on you.

[Commenting to NME on the hypocritically differing attitudes towards male and female rockstars]- You've got to be prepared for the names they are going to call you compared to your male peers... You will be a floozy and a slattern. He will be virile and a ladies' man. You will be a freakshow, a retching wretch, a sloppy drunk. He will be charismatic, vainglorious, a ferocious drunk and Dionysian. You will be indiscriminate and desperate. He will be generous, tortured and driven.

I am just the classic person who wants to learn stuff. I want good tutors, and with Kurt I had the best.

[on clinging to all of her late husband's belongings in 2007] "My house is like a mausoleum. My daughter doesn't need to inherit a giant hefty bag full of flannel shirts....A sweater, a guitar and the lyrics to 'Teen Spirit'--that's what my daughter gets. And the rest of it we'll just sell."

[on Hole's successful second album, Live Through This (1994)] "It was so easy to make that I get surprised by the effect it had on people. But, you know, all good rock is easy. The riffs just came, and they were fresh from chords that I'd learned from [Billy] Corgan and Kurt [Cobain]. I wrote 'Doll Parts' in five minutes."

There's a kind of appeal in vulnerability, and there's an appeal in sort of a quantum vulnerability, where you really are exposing something. It's like, a "haha, what are you gonna do?" kind of thing. "Yeah, come here, screw with me, I'm only, like, hanging upside down on a cross."

How can any woman be the female Jim Morrison? What Jim Morrison was was a sexual object. Women - we invented rock and roll, and sexualized men so that we could go and scream at these unattainable football captains.

I wanted to be something when I grew up, and I grew up in the '70s. What was I gonna be, a movie star? Movie stars say other people's words. A writer- I'm undisciplined. A rock star- that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid.

[2009] I'm sober. I'm fabulous. I have a few character defects, but I'm not dishonorable and I'm not a liar. I have a good heart...I've never claimed to be anyone's role model. I'm not Mother Teresa.

I like to mentor young women and encourage them to play music. It's like teaching someone to play a sport; it doesn't matter if they grow up to be a professional athlete. It is a skillset you can use for the rest of your life and it keeps people out of trouble. Every girl should know how to play three chords on a guitar; it should be mandatory. It will keep them out of trouble, and they'll get any guy they want [laughs].

[commenting on her brief relationship with Trent Reznor] "Trent and I had this torrid whatever-you-want-to-call-it...he said in "Details" that my alleged pregnancy would have to be immaculate conception, so I said in "Spin" 'Don't call your band "Nine Inch Nails" if you have a three inch one!' My band is called "Hole." It's not called "big hole," it's not called "little hole," it's not called "flapping nony", it's not called "teeny rosebud", it's not called "Barbie pussy." It's called "Hole.""

[on her music career with Hole] "I said this band is going to be ten times bigger than Sonic Youth but not as big as Jane's Addiction. What was the but for?! It's like a fucking curse! The gods were listening that day! I could have said 'this band will be ten times bigger than Sonic Youth and The Beatles' and that's where we'd be right now."

[on Kathleen Hanna] I still don't like her. She bugs me. Kathleen Hanna runs that ship [her relationship with Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz] in a way that is far more Yoko than I would be. I envision her being in a decked-out loft with a little corner for a desk that look like it belongs in a poor person's East Village apartment, with her battered-women's stuff and her Ms. magazines and all her communication with leading feminists.

Every time you buy a Nirvana record, part of that money is not going to Kurt's child, or to me, it's going to a handful of Jew loan officers, Jew private banks, it's going to lawyers who are also bankers.

[referring to "Pretty on the Inside" as "unlistenable"] That record was a calling card for rock critics and hardcorers, [saying] 'This is what I do, and I am not going to back down from it. I am announcing my persona as a c**t. Thank you very much.'

No one's been dormant. Patty teaches drumming and drums in three indie bands. Melissa has her metal-nerd thing going on - her dream is to play Castle Donington with Dokken. Eric hasn't flipped - I jammed with him, he's still doing his Thurston [Moore]-crazy tunings, still corresponding with Kevin Shields. We all get along great. There are bands who reunite and hate each others' guts.