“I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.”

If you can make nature and technology friends, then you can make everyone friends; you can make everyone intact. That’s what women do a lot – they’re the glue between a lot of things.

In school, I guess I was a difficult, know-it-all type of student… I was always complaining that music education was too academic.

I’d done three solo albums in a row, and that’s quite narcissistic.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places.

There is this stereotype of Icelanders all believing in spirits, and I’ve played up to that a bit in interviews.

I get highs, to be totally honest, in second-hand shops. My hunting instinct, I expect, really kicks in.

For a person as obsessed with music as I am, I always hear a song in the back of my head, all the time, and that usually is my own tune. I’ve done that all my life.

Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, ‘Oh, everybody’s perfect except me. Everything’s smooth except me.’ But nothing is smooth.

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. But when Bush got elected, that was the first time I started actually reading the news.

I do try and wear stuff by unknown designers, and I make sure I pay because if nothing else I have money.

I definitely can feel the third or fourth feminist wave in the air, so maybe this is a good time to open that Pandora’s box a little bit and air it out.

i thrive best hermit style. with a beard and a pipe.

Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.

If nothing else, I have money.

I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You’re not just imagining things. It’s tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.

Sometimes, when I have a lot of ideas and I want to do a lot of things, or when I’m traveling,

We don’t have a lot of men on stage doing flamboyant or theatrical. We have a lot of female pop stars doing it, but where are the guys? Where’s the classic pop-rock showman?

I think the responsibility of pop stars is to liberate the masses. In that everyone can be whatever they wanna be.

My pop is this big, huge man, nothing can hurt him. I went running into his bedroom like, ‘Daddy, Daddy, the boogie man’s under the bed!’ Pop opens one eye, he’s like, ‘Is the boogie man bigger than me?’ ‘

People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they’re emotionally dead.

From her gospel-singing mother Cissy Houston, her legendary pop-diva cousin Dionne Warwick, and her Queen of Soul godmother Aretha Franklin

I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I like to write pop songs and the stuff I write is fairly poppy, so I thought maybe my lot in life was to write pop songs for people. It never felt right writing songs for other people to sing, though.