I survived on sandwiches, and I was on stage every night for six years of my life. I was working 16 hours a day between class, rehearsal, being on stage.
Putting my words piece online was an important part of my plan to help women learn how to love themselves and have a better life.
For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.
Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark. A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle, while I invisibly remain standing.
My life has been a happy accident. Anybody who succeeds in anything should count their lucky stars, because that's the biggest element. It's not hard work; it's not necessarily talent.
I wouldn't call myself successful, just obsessively exhausted. The music makes me smile, the movies make me feel humbled, and the comedy saves my life every day.
I don't think of my life as a cliche, but I'm a cliche eccentric. Complete with a strange name - I mean, who's named Val? How many Vals do you know? I mean, really?
The biggest similarity between me and my character is that we've both played clubs for 20 years. In real life, the clubs aren't quite as controlled - and my hair isn't quite as in place as it is on 'Ally McBeal.'
I never saw anything more like real warfare in my life - only the attack was all on one side. The police, in spite of their numbers, apparently thought they could not cope with the crowd.
My life is quite physical anyway. When you are three-foot-six you kind of have to climb stuff now and again, and you find yourself in quite precarious situations just to manage in what is quite a big world.
I live by 'Earnin' and burnin'.' Meaning, I like to make money and spend it before I even have it. That's the way I live my life.
Like everybody, I've had a lot of pain in my life and I'm a work in progress. You must have a true desire to see the world from a different point of view, and that comes with growing up.
It was all devastating. I'd never dealt with losing anyone close to me, and I didn't know where to put it in my life. I was very young then. Buddy taught me so much in such a short time.
I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse.
But when I was a teenager, the idea of spending the rest of my life in a factory was real depressing. So the idea that I could become a musician opened up some possibilities I didn't see otherwise.
There's nothing regular about my life at all, really. I don't keep a regular schedule and every day is different. It's all rather chaotic.
I don't want children. Why should I let some strange little monster into my life to destroy what to me is a perfect set-up?
I have never been bored an hour in my life. I get up every morning wondering what new strange glamorous thing is going to happen and it happens at fairly regular intervals.
I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That's why I'm in a wheelchair: I've been doing it physically - it's hard labour - throughout my life.
You have to fall. You have to understand what that feels like. For what I want in my life, and for where I want to go with this music, you gotta be humiliated, man. You gotta understand what that feels like. It just makes you stronger.
I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that. And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy.
