“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’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.

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.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

You keep me at a distance when all I want to have you is close.

They say eyes don’t lie, but I mistook the distance in your eyes for depth.

Billy wanted me to stay a safe distance from the most important person in my life. It turned out that his concern was, in the end, unnecessary. I was all too safe now.

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

Because sometimes the value lasts only as long as the distance does.

Authority doesn’t work without prestige, or prestige without distance.

Distance, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs and keep.