The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

No one starts playing my kind of music to make a fortune. But I do want to keep doing what I do and I do want to continue selling records. And I would, eventually, quite like some money.

I'd like to make music for as long as I can; it feels like something I need to do.

My reaction to everything in life is when it gets a bit complicated to water it down and make it simple again.

Basically what Salomé did with Rilke as a mentor was direct him toward the Russian Orthodox Church, so he could project his love of the divine feminine onto the Virgin Mary. She wanted him to stop the cycle of being disappointed by the ultimate humanity of women. She was like, "You don't want me, you want the Virgin Mary." It's kind of a mystical concept! She also changed Freud's opinion, a little bit too late, about the female psyche, which he had so wrong. If it had been better publicized, it would have changed Western society's perception of the female psyche, too.

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

I know how ridiculous this sounds because of the job I do but I don't believe in romanticism and make-believe.