| # | Quote |
|---|
| 1 | When a song wants to be written, it will be written. |
| 2 | The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence. |
| 3 | 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. |
| 4 | My songs are not pretty. They're what I call optimistic realism. |
| 5 | 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. |
| 6 | I'd prefer to be good, but I'm not always. I struggle. |
| 7 | I'm a songwriter, and I understand artistic licence. We can embellish, go on little journeys and explore our inner selves. It can be quite self-indulgent. |
| 8 | Now that I'm feeling the responsibilities of adulthood, the choices we make become an incredible weight. |
| 9 | I'm a lot more observational than personal in my writing. My writing is mostly a lot of questions without answers. |
| 10 | When I'm singing I feel like I'm talking to someone. I'm in conversation when I perform - either with myself or with whomever is listening. |
| 11 | I am slightly fascinated by the question of whether humanity is capable of change. I may have come to the conclusion that we're not, but we keep trying. |
| 12 | I feel like I'm creeping closer to finding the situation that triggers songwriting, which is obviously an extreme of an emotion. |
| 13 | I don't need to sell tons of records, but I want longevity. I want to make music for the rest of my life. |
| 14 | 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. |
| 15 | I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs. |
| 16 | I need some isolation, it's necessary to me, that's just who I am. I need to be left alone. |
| 17 | I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture. |
| 18 | I just think of everything I do and how happy it will make me to do it. I don't like having my photograph taken, for instance, so I don't do that often. |
| 19 | It took a lot of time and practice for me to realise that there's no point trying to be something you're not. |
| 20 | I get up, go and get a coffee, and go do the crossword - I'm loyal to one particular paper, the 'Guardian' - and that's my idea of a perfect morning. |
| 21 | I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that. |
| 22 | You are what you can prove you've done. That's how people judge you. |
| 23 | 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. |
| 24 | I'd like to make music for as long as I can; it feels like something I need to do. |
| 25 | Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity. |
| 26 | 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. |
| 27 | I think your most intimate thoughts are only honest when they're in your head. |
| 28 | Womanhood is something you don't consider until it hits you. |
| 29 | People think I look odd onstage. But the way I deal with being incredibly nervous is by concentrating really hard. |
| 30 | I know how ridiculous this sounds because of the job I do but I don't believe in romanticism and make-believe. |
| 31 | All my songs come from me because I only seem able to write about myself and my experiences. |
| 32 | 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. |
| 33 | My reaction to everything in life is when it gets a bit complicated to water it down and make it simple again. |
| 34 | I definitely tell things at arm's length but that is conscious. No part of me wants everybody to know what's going on. |
| 35 | 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. |
| 36 | I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs. |
| 37 | 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. |
| 38 | 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. |
| 39 | I'm incredibly neurotic and a control freak. I like the thought that if there's going to be anyone to blame it's going to be me. |
| 40 | 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. |
$600 Thousand
