“I’ve had a wordless phase, and that’s still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.”

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn’t feel like it’s about me. Time created a distance.

I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional.

I try to imagine how we would live if we didn’t know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around.

There’s not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.

The music comes first. When Geoff has made something the inspiration comes automatically. His music is very expressive. But still is is a very difficult process: I have to add something to his music, not push it away. It has to be equal, and I find that very difficult.

The blackness of darkness, forever.

I think that after a year of Portishead I’ve become a little more sober.

A lot of people question my image and why I do what I do, and the answer is because this is how I want to present myself.

I’ve just put my heart and soul in a song and need at least a week to recover.

My voice adapts itself to the music. I can do a lot more than you hear in Portishead.

Suffering for your art is most definitely overrated but I do get a certain, I don’t know, satisfaction from being able to deal with my paranoia and insecurity.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

creates jobs all over the world, and makes life easier for millions of Americans.

We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it.

This is a hump you have to get over, and it usually comes in the first series.

In the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do.

Over all, I want you to discover the joy of creation by your own hand.

I believe the main solution is to gain the trust of Europe and America and to remove their concerns over the peaceful nature of our nuclear industry and to assure them that there will never be a diversion to military use.