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

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!

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.

I don’t read music; I taught myself guitar.

One time I completely thought I’d turned into a werewolf and was sure I could see hairs sprouting from my face. At those times I’d suddenly go very quiet and not talk to anyone, stunned from the developments, being a werewolf and all.

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.

The heart is that which lies at the centre of things, and is also formless.

Wherever the centre of a thing lies, there lies its heart, for the word ‘heart’ means centrality.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

With L’Oreal, I get to be Aimee Mullins, model. No qualifier. And that means everything to me.

It’s really rubbish that some kind of “technical” learning means you will be a better person because you know this skill better.

A woman wanted to know how to deal with anger. I asked when anger arose whose anger it was. She said it was hers.

I would love, more than anything, to do an out-and-out farce with huge physical energy.

To practice Dhamma means to observe and examine oneself.