“Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where noone notices the contrast of white on white.”

It’s impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It’s the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.

When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.

But what you realise after you’ve been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don’t have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

I can’t remember all the times I’ve tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

Bravery is what you can do in the face of things that hurt and scare you, but you do it anyway.

Eventually, they’ll just go away, because you will make them sad. That’s something I’ve proven quite adept at doing over the years.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn’t mean you’re fantastic.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.

For all the things I’m losing I might aswell resign myself to try and make a change.

Closeness to other people is really hard, but it’s also a shame because it’s all you want too. But it doesn’t always work.

I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can’t see how to do it.

If you want to really love someone, you’ve got to let go and loosen up and just care.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it’s such a common, constant thing in people’s lives – a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it’s just accepted.

By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.

People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it’s really the position of line that’s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.

Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

The contrast was incredible.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

PITY, n. A failing sense of exemption, inspired by contrast.