“I have, like, sensory overload problems.”

I just wanted to write the songs. I never wanted to sing them.

I think artists are aware that talking gives a songwriter so much material. If they just tell us what’s happening, it’s so much easier for us to write a song that’s specific to them.

I would give anything to hold your hands like this again.

We could be history in the making.

Still finding silly string in weird places.

I write songs for myself, but I never keep them. I’m like, ‘O.K., that was my therapy – it’s out of my body now. I’m going to give it to somebody else so it can be their therapy, too.’

Women often don’t want to be typecast as the girl that’s sad.

There is so much power in vulnerability, and I am proud to be that typecast.

It’s ingrained in people’s minds that it’s a typecast and a stereotype that women are just emotional and crazy.

Plantin’ lemon trees since I was twenty-three

People are going to assume whatever they want to assume.

Hula-hooping. It makes me feel free. My stepsister introduced me to it. I used to have panic attacks all the time, and she hula-hooped to cope with her own anxiety.

Stylistically, things are becoming cooler. People are trying different things and combining genres.

I think that women are afraid to be vulnerable because they think it makes them look weak.

Working with new people can be really hard and nerve-wracking. When you don’t know the person, it’s like being on a blind date.

Tired of people telling me how I should have a fucking body. What I should wear on it. How I should act with it. What I should fucking shave off of it.

What we are going to do as Democrats is put together a really strong platform that focuses on jobs and economic issues.

Blame enables us to smuggle our issues into our future.

Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil… The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.

Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can’t even yet agree on what their laws should be.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

I don’t want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes.

I want to be blunt: We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work, and access to birth control, in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago – until the Republicans brought them back.

Even at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.