“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 was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen.

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.

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.

I used to think that drinking would help my shyness, but all it did was exaggerate all the negative qualities.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

At parties, everyone always thinks I’m drinking, but actually I rarely drink. I live on energy drinks, basically. I love vitamin water.

[On alcohol:] Total abstinence is an impossibility and it will not do to insist on it as a general practice.

Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

Instead of warning pregnant women not to drink,I think female alcoholics ought to be told not to fuck.

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.