Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love dressing up.
I quite like androgyny.
I'd tell everyone to come in naked in full body paint.
In the music industry, intelligence in women is undervalued.
They say for every high high there must be a low low low low low
I like to get dark sometimes and then come back out into the light.
I think Deborah Harry has a really sexy, cool and quite playful sex-kitten kind of style I really like.
Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time - very inspiring and dramatic.
I like it when people make an effort to wear things that you wouldn't normally put together - I like eccentrics.
I don't like to be too submissive in the way I dress. I like quite boyish things, so I hardly ever wear high heels.
I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness.
We are bits of energy floating about in various guises, and when we die we rejoin the big cosmic soup of the universe.
Music's free and music's for everyone to enjoy and express and interpret. It transcends countries and times and decades.
When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them.
I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.
I cry a lot when I feel empathy. I can feel heartbroken by life, and I cry quite easily, sometimes for no reason. It's healthy, I think.
The creative part of your brain needs to be stimulated. Sometimes you get blocked in the thing you do, because there's so much pressure to do it.
I'd love to win a Grammy! Not ambitious or anything. And just having a really lovely bunch of kids and a happy family life, would be good for me.
I think the best cure is to stop doing the thing that you think you should be doing and go and have a bit of fun in another medium, maybe other crazy things.
I want to add something worthwhile rather than just chucking loads of stuff into the world. I don't want to feel responsible for adding to the soup of mediocrity.
I get people being frightened of me. One time I did this photo shoot where I had hairy armpits - I was really digging it, but they were like, 'We'll airbrush that out.'
The record company doesn't know what to do with me, because I'm not a Lily Allen, but I'm not really an indie artist, either. All the best artists have been in the middle.
There's something in me that loves to inspire people: when I'm playing music, I imagine all this sparkly stardust going through everyone. I want to make people come alive.
Mum says that, since I was a tiny baby, I've had the most strong-willed and stubborn personality known to man. Although that was a real pain for her, she admired my resolve.
I don't think music is the first thing I turn to. For me, I think visual art is more the thing. Sometimes when I've been doing music for a while, I can't really take any more in.
I find the world pretty overwhelming, so I'm getting into meditation and doing lots of yoga. And I love my garden, and I love nature, and I feel like that grounds me and keeps my mind clear.
When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.
When I finished touring 'Fur and Gold,' I was just like, 'What am I doing? What do I have? Where is my home?' I didn't really know where it was, so I went to New York to try and make it there.
The way you wield your power is about using it to afford you opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have. So I'm very creatively ambitious, and I just hope people notice it; that's all I want.
All of the art that I love is about peeling back layers and delving into something that's in a subconscious or dream realm. People like Jan Svankmajer, or the artist Yoshimoto Nara, or David Lynch.
I did gardening and cooking and drawing and reading to try take the pressure off the music - just being eclectic and putting the fun back in and bringing more innocence in again is really important.
David Bowie worked with Brian Eno and dressed up in extraordinary clothes, but he was also a brilliant songwriter who captured the thoughts of a generation. He was hugely successful, without compromise.
I think what I wanted to do was meet someone who knew more than me about songwriting structure and progressions and middle eights and things that more traditional writers write and I don't usually employ.
I think music naturally wants to be played with more than one person. There's a surprise element, and you don't know what it will be, and it's up to that other person's energy to help create this third thing.
I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.
When I'm doing just music all the time, it can get really overwhelming. It's always challenging to switch it up a bit. And just because you're a musician, it doesn't mean that music is your only creative outlet.
In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.
I had Halloween parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe.
I had Hallowe'en parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe.
I live in a Moomin house in East London which I fill with blankets and nice crockery and get people round for dinner. When you travel a lot, you feel rootless and adrift - this is my sanctuary, where I can breathe out.
I always think that the exceptional people are those who remain outsiders but still communicate on a grand scale. I think I want everyone to feel more free, and so I feel really claustrophobic on behalf of lots of people.
When I use electronic beats and program things, there's something quite brain about that - you're feeling it in your body but it's like a puzzle you wanna solve, and it gets very detailed. I really enjoy that side of music.
I've hidden behind my hair more than clothes. Sometimes having long hair with a fringe is very useful when you don't want to look at people. I used to have very short hair, but long hair is my thing - a black nocturnal shield.
Each album takes two or two-and-a-half years to finish between recording and touring. It's like being with an old boyfriend every single night watching the same things on TV. There is a world out there going on that I'm missing.
I get invited to premieres, and I've been to a few fashion shows and stuff, but I always get really bored. I feel quite awkward. You have to wear something by them, and it all feels like, 'Why am I doing free advertising for you?'
There's this label called Neurotica by these sweet girls that have given me some lovely things to wear, and we might collaborate on making a little piece. They're really lovely, and I think they've been quite inspired by me in turn.
I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect. That's when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn't feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.
When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.
It can be frightening to turn your back on what others think is right. But I'm not the same as a lot of people - I'm quite artistic and quite eccentric sometimes. If you honour that, you fit into yourself better - and people accept you for what you are.