Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I feel increasingly like age is very irrelevant. Quite often, cynicism is confused with wisdom, and my scorn is confused with a knowing, which I don't have.
I made an important decision, which was to pursue happiness. Rather than accept unhappiness. That's why I'm here, and it's great. I'm in a very good place in my life.
There's huge amounts of nonsense that goes with everything surrounding music and art. All the things you have to do promote yourself - there's huge amounts of nonsense.
I'm not religious, I'm not romantic and I live purely by logic. I make every decision by logic and sometimes that leads me to the right and sometimes to the wrong decision.
I've noticed that, with many of the authors I like, I tend to think I would dislike them as human beings or that there'd be a healthy amount of debate if I ever did meet them.
I'm reluctantly interested in love and helplessly interested in logic and yet they're so conflicting. And they're both necessary for a happy balance, a happy existence... I think.
I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.
No one starts playing my kind of music to make a fortune. But I do want to keep doing what I do and I do want to continue selling records. And I would, eventually, quite like some money.
People don't appreciate music any more. They don't adore it. They don't buy vinyl and just love it. They love their laptops like their best friend, but they don't love a record for its sound quality and its artwork.
I think everybody who relates to music is kind of isolated. It's lonely. Everyone who uses the creative side of their brain is that much removed from reality. They are looking for answers wherever they can find them.
The female psyche is inherently self-sufficient, because female sexuality is inherently self-sufficient. I think women are maybe more comfortable, or women are able to find physical beauty in each other that doesn't terrify them.
I remember my father playing me Same Situation when I was a nipper, and saying how nobody since has done melodies as well as Joni Mitchell. I concur. The thing that most affected me was just her resonance, and that is something she must have been born with.
I don't have much to complain about in life, because I've lived a very privileged existence and continue to. I just think, What if I didn't have that confidence or strength of character, and I was left with certain perceptions of what a woman's place is in the world?
Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?
It is quite hard to relax in London. I always say I'd move somewhere quieter, but I am a bit of a confirmed urbanite now - it crept up on me without me noticing. I always think that I function quite well on my own, unusually so, but then I'm reminded how important people are to me.
I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.
I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
In my experience, the psychological aspect of femininity tends to be more receptive and apathetic and delicate. I think that because the feminine is a bit quieter, we live in a masculine-dominated society. It is the front-forward force that runs the world. And that's not the fault of men by any means, that's just the way the world works.
One woman I interviewed, Amanda Ghost, said, "Let's not bullshit, there are no women at the top of the music business, and that is a serious problem." And I said, "Yes!" And I didn't shy away from saying that. But I still don't want to be in the firing line. I'm not clever or witty or brave enough to get into the political nitty-gritty with it.
Rilke has a very bizarre relationship to women because his mother had an older child, a girl who died when she was a baby. So when Rilke was born she named him Sophie and dressed him as a girl until he was 7. And psychologically, the repercussions of that made him the genius that he is. By the time he was 35, he was continuously falling in love with older women, mother figures, spiritual mothers.
I would never sit and write a song in front of anyone, because you're so vulnerable. I don't know at what point in the process that it becomes acceptable to pass them on. When a song wants to be written, it will be written. When it does come, I will very rarely go back and edit lyrics. I'm quite a rational human being, and the only part of my life that I can't rationalise, or can't make sense of, is how a song gets written or why.
I've got my laptop, but it troubles me in many ways. I don't have Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It ruins a romantic idea, which might just be an illusion, a sense of depth or continuity. I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.
I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.
I sound awful saying it but I think it can be like that. I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. And not just boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. They find themselves in stagnant friendships. If people were a little less scared [of ending things] they'd get more out of life… You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfil a certain something in your life. You fulfil something in theirs. But there's a time limit to that. Unless you choose to be bloody good company for the rest of your life, do you know what I mean?
Basically what Salomé did with Rilke as a mentor was direct him toward the Russian Orthodox Church, so he could project his love of the divine feminine onto the Virgin Mary. She wanted him to stop the cycle of being disappointed by the ultimate humanity of women. She was like, "You don't want me, you want the Virgin Mary." It's kind of a mystical concept! She also changed Freud's opinion, a little bit too late, about the female psyche, which he had so wrong. If it had been better publicized, it would have changed Western society's perception of the female psyche, too.