“I try to stick to a certain diet all the time, and then when I feel like a reward, I have it. I try to stick to no dairy, no sugar, no wheat.”

I like someone with a really good and dark sense of humour.

I think everybody should focus on inner beauty.

I am inspired by show girls and Vegas. I was a cabaret performer, so that’s where all that influence comes from.

I wasn’t really comfortable reading until I was 12.

When I do my shows, it’s really cross-generational. Sometimes there’s three generations there.

I just really want to make albums – and however I can, I will.

I’d say that, first and foremost, I’m a performer; I started performing when I was four years old, and being on stage from a young age set me up.

Curvy is something to be proud of.

It’s tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, ‘Oh, look, another quirky girl.’

I really hate bureaucracy and the idea that I’m not a free person.

I think soul is soul. I don’t see new soul as any different to old soul.

I agree with cosmetic surgery for medical reasons – my mother had breast cancer and I think it’s very sad when somebody has no choice in what happens to their body.

I dread the idea of a paparazzi snapping me while I’m out running.

It’s celebrated in British culture to be eccentric.

Sometimes people fear the truth. They’d rather not speak to you than know what you really think.

I love going to the cinema. Whenever I get time off, that’s where I go.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler.

You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.

She loved him so much she concealed his name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.