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

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

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.

If the impulse to daring and bravery is too fierce and violent, stay it with guidance and instruction.

I feel like what I have become is halfway between my mother and my father, violent and impulsive and desperate and afraid. I feel like I have lost control of what I have become.

We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed.

We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.

Like ‘naive,’ ‘impulsive’ and ‘way too connected online,’ are all things we can turn into strengths to help us.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.