Viv Albertine

Most female artists - to do what you have to do and to be as honest as you have to be, to be as selfish as you have to be, as tunnel-visioned as you have to be to make art, not entertainment - you can't compromise, really.

I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.

Female rage is not often acknowledged - never mind written about - so one of the questions I'm asking is, 'Are you allowed to be this angry as you grow older as a woman?' But I'm also trying to trace where my anger came from. Who made me the person that is still so raw and angry? I think that it's empowering to ask that question.

I'm still angry at so much - class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.

When you've fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.

Fashion wasn't a label back in the '70s. We made our own clothes because we had no money.

If you've written something that moves you and frightens you, you just can't take it back.

There are more and more of us women out there who won't be pushed around and will give back a lot more than was bargained for. You have to mean it, though.

Strive to be different and better than what is already out there if you are creating - Benjamin Clementine does that.

My mother was so ignorant of what could have befallen me and was probably so exhausted - she was one of the first generation of single parents as well - that it was all a bit overwhelming. So the naivety of parents meant we did have a certain amount of freedom.

I like writing because I can do it anywhere, and I don't need money to do it.

I think, often, people who do something new creatively don't benefit financially from it - it's the people who come after and make them palatable that make money.