I've done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can't use it for progress.
I don't want to be viewed as a womaniser or whatever. I don't like going crazy crazy, I like having fun but it's nice to wake up in your own bed, isn't it?
I miss my parents a lot. I obviously don't see them loads anyway because they live up north. But knowing that they're only a couple of hours away is a lot different than knowing that they're 12 hours away.
You're always going to write and draw inspiration from things that you're feeling, things that you've felt. It's kind of impossible not to unless you're writing a song and there's an exact scenario that you're trying to write a song for.
My songs have a lot going on in them -they're packed with sounds. When I have only three or four minutes to capture something, I guess I can't stand the idea of any bar going unloved.
I'll meet someone on the street and blurt out my most intimate details. I think everybody secretly - or not so secretly - wants to be understood, and I just want to connect, you know?
And in fact, one of the central reasons why I never got involved with any drugs or anything is that I remember talking to people in maybe 1975 who saw Hendrix but couldn't remember it. I was like, 'How could that be?'
I was a pretty nice kid. Kind of quiet, but quiet in terms I wasn't going out and setting fire to anything. I had a big mouth and I was creative type, you know.
The Internet is the Wild West of the world, where anybody can throw anything down. Everything can be as relevant as the next thing; it doesn't matter who posts it. In that environment, the Critics' Choice is still very important.
The prevailing ideology of the modern west - which is political economy - is in the doghouse. Having failed to notice atmospheric pollution, the economists then frightened themselves with the sort of financial crisis they said they had abolished.
If you've ever had your heart broken, it's like, once is enough - you can live a lifetime on that. Ya know? You can write a lot of records on one broken heart.
I always wear rings and cuffs from Made Her Think because designer Meredith Kahn is my friend and is one of my fashion idols. Everything she creates is really fresh.
I know there are lots of regional accents in England, but I can't tell them apart and I'm not really aware of class. I don't pay any attention to those boundaries. I'm a California girl.
We can all afford to do a little soul-searching about the choices we make and the way we live our lives, but sometimes searching one's soul doesn't provide the answers we seek.
I'm a severe graphic novels junkie. People ask me about it, and I say I like the graphic novels. Comic books are for kids, and graphic novels are for adults. But you can't really separate the two.
In the United States, you can put on a cowboy hat and join the country-western neighborhood. If you're down below 14th Street in New York City, that's bohemian; that's left-wing.
While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town.
We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren’t sure if we were in love anymore.
When I talk about the Internet, it's because young people are there. TV and radio are still what moves the masses, and you can't ignore that. But you also have to feed that monster that grows daily, which is the Internet.
We were too young to know better, and none of us were very aggressive people. It would have helped a lot if just one of us had been aggressive enough to say no.
It is too bad that the public expects from me, always, perfection which it is impossible for me always to attain. I am not a machine. I am a human being.
