I'm such an incredibly, stupidly sensitive person that everything that happens to me, I experience it really intensely. I feel everything very deeply. And when you feel things deeply and you think about things a lot and you think about how you feel, you learn a lot about yourself. And when you know yourself, you know life.

I know what my job is: I write the songs, I sing them, I play them on the piano

I'm not the Queen. I'm not a huge superstar; I don't get paparazzi around me.

I like the idea of the idler wheel - it just sits in between things, but it makes such a big difference in the way that the machine is working. That concept has always been something that has interested me, but I didn't really know why.

If I have one success in my relationship history, it's with the people who listen to my music. I think that they'll be there with me forever, and I'll be there with them forever. And I'm totally satisfied with that.

One of my friends said to me, "Oh yeah, of course you aren't writing." So I was like, "The next time you see me, I'm gonna have a new song." I wrote "Criminal" in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.

The worst pain in the world is shame.