I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything.

Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it's quite small and contained.

When you look at the media and television, and all this Hollywood stuff, you just judge people.

I loved English literature - if didn't it would have been hard - but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.

On-stage, I definitely want to use my real self because I'm singing to people who believe in what I'm singing, and I believe in what I'm singing, but they shouldn't be fooled because we all have fake selves and it's in there somewhere. It's not pretending to hurt somebody; it's just something that comes out of me, from my experience.

I think it is all about creating characters, mixing them up with the stars and the light-years, and coming back to Earth, because we're from this universe. We're not just New York or London; we're stars.