“I think a lot of good directors listen to music while they’re working. The songs just don’t become a part of the film. They’re replaced.”

I drink a lot, probably too much. My scene while writing lyrics is always a bottle of scotch and stacks of note cards, pencil and pencil sharpener. I throw around note cards and drink.

People aren’t going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They’d rather just have the martini.

Everything I write is personal, really. Even when I’m sarcastic, it’s quite personal. And on this record, from the production to the singing to the performances, I got it really honest.

If I’m in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don’t need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.

I start songs all the time. If I weren’t so lazy, I would finish them. It’s like when I have a deadline I have to.

I divorce myself from listeners who aren’t tolerant of humor. I did notice universally that, especially when it comes to weight, people look in the mirror and get the angle just right, tell themselves it’s all right, and then they go out.

But I really do have a soft spot for the solo shows. Any musician who writes and sings will tell you that’s the center of it, that is it. It’s almost like there’s something church-like about it and you gotta go back there, if you’re a songwriter that sings your material.

I’m not really a strange person or anything, so if there’s music I like, usually there’s other people who like it too.

In many ways, I’ve chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don’t like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

The way I see it, there’s only one melody for any song.

The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point.

Notes don’t make music until you learn to insert silence between them.

I have manic energy. What can be done about it? I don’t know what to say sometimes. I’m professional in public, but I like to stay inside and be a hermit.

White people don’t sing together very often, and when they do, it’s about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.

Being capable of anything is a bullshit concept, unless it means you also admit that you’re capable of cheating, lying and killing.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.

Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

When I was creative director [at Estée Lauder], I was always being asked about my beauty must-haves. From there I had this fun idea to create a line of what was in my makeup bag. But I also love accessories, and people associate me with home, family, and beauty.

When I took the job as Estée Lauder’s creative director, the first thing I did was go into the archives! I love taking our heritage and making it modern.

As a girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse; if I could still play with it now, I would! I used to love a well-arranged room: the furniture, the fabric, the lighting.