“I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.”

My manager said the next best inspiration to heartbreak is travel, and it’s true.

I don’t believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I’ve been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man.

When I was really young I used to collect frog spawn. I made a pond out of an old sink and I loved to spend hours watching the frogs grow.

Therapy is like telling your nightmares when you’re a kid; they lose their power to hurt and control.

I’d say my greatest fear is fear itself.

Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.

Even when I haven’t had money, I found money to travel. It’s a luxury that’s a kind of necessity, I think.

I get told I’m a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word “confessional”. I don’t like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don’t want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I’m letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!

The way I write, words can means lots of different things.

At about the age of ten, my friends and I discovered the joys of sitting in graveyards drinking merrydown cider and kissing and stealing our elder siblings’ records.

I love the water more than anything. I’m not very good at sunbathing – I get really bored. I love swimming and I love being like a fish and getting in the sea and just – I don’t know, it feels right.

I’m not comfortable holidaying in other people’s poverty.

My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.

When I’m on a roll nothing makes me happier or feel more satisfied, like plugging in, life makes sense.

Norfolk is not on the way to anywhere, you don’t stop off on the way somewhere else – it’s an end in itself. You have to want to go there; it’s an effort.

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.

Do not underestimate the importance of feeling special.

It belongs to the very substance of nonviolence never to destroy or damage another person’s feeling of self worth, even an opponent’s. We all need, constantly, an advance of trust and affirmation.

What a wonderful thing is to be able to contribute to the restoration of someone’s health. It’s not only a feeling that I’m worth something, but that I have something to contribute.

Welcome, wild harbinger of spring! To this small nook of earth; Feeling and fancy fondly cling.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

I’m going to leave y’all with one thought. I’m a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about this.

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.