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The responsibility of an artist is to be honest with themselves.

We artists have the dignity to tell the truth to the people, unlike politicians.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

Not all artists have a responsibility to be socially or politically aware, but they do have a responsibility to make great art. They have to find some truth and put that in their music.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Every artist has to make their own statements and they have to live with them.

Most artists think they're frauds anyway.

Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid.

Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

I see so many activists... who are artists because they feel that they have the power of communication.