The icon opens up about her mistakes, her family, and her journey to become a better person.

“There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend.”

An interview with Cobain a few months after the release of In Utero.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg on coming out as trans.

An interview with Maurice Sendak.

Deep Throat, unmasked.

“This baby was unviable, basically. That’s what they say. They say that the baby is ‘incompatible with life.’”

“I always walk away from an interview — no matter how well it went — knowing that there’s so much that I don’t know about that person.”

An interview with the activist.

Outkast’s Andre Benjamin at 42.

You gotta understand, I’ve only written one check in my life. When I was 17, they still had checkbooks, and my mom taught me how to write a check and do my balance. So I had one check on my balance, and then OutKast took off. I have not paid a bill since. People ask, What does it feel like? As humans, we want attention. We want to be validated. At the same time, it’s strange attention, and a lot of it. If you have an excess of anything, it becomes strange.

An interview with the mind behind Star Trek.

An 11-hour conversation about “well, just about everything that’s ever been funny.”

The ’90s icon and Nine Inch Nails frontman talks about listening to music, his own and others, in 2017.

"If I had been a straight-A student my whole life and had rapped about Jesus coming back to save us all, I wouldn’t get no media. The motherfuckers wouldn’t give a fuck about me. But since I’m telling the truth, and been through what I’m stressing and know what I’m talking about, I’m a threat."

“‘Make America Great Again’ means ‘Make America White Again.’ So now you have this other explosion of people who want to feel above something, better than something. And who is that? That’s me.”

"I’m not familiar with books on style. My role in the revival of Strunk’s book was a fluke—just something I took on because I was not doing anything else at the time. It cost me a year out of my life, so little did I know about grammar."

An interview with Dylan, 75, on the power of recording standards.

“Do you think you’re talking to a normal person here?”

An interview with Joan Didion.

“We have a lot in common. We go to the same shrink.”

“Oh, I think I do overshare, and I sometime marvel that I do it. But it's sort of - in a way, it's my way of trying to understand myself. I don't know. I get it out of my head. It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don't know - I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too.”

“Let me state, in all frankness, that I have never harbored personal doubts or a lack of confidence. That may be good or it may be bad. But if you see your actions as objectively correct, then not having doubts is good. I must admit that pride may have influenced my attitudes from time to time. But once I came to a conclusion as to what was right, I had great personal confidence in those ideas.”

A conversation about beauty with an 86-year-old mathematician.

“The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response. The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.”

The author on Lolita, his work habits, and what he expected from his literary afterlife.