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.

I get up, go and get a coffee, and go do the crossword - I'm loyal to one particular paper, the 'Guardian' - and that's my idea of a perfect morning.

People think I look odd onstage. But the way I deal with being incredibly nervous is by concentrating really hard.

I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.

I sound awful saying it but I think it can be like that. I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. And not just boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. They find themselves in stagnant friendships. If people were a little less scared [of ending things] they'd get more out of life… You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfil a certain something in your life. You fulfil something in theirs. But there's a time limit to that. Unless you choose to be bloody good company for the rest of your life, do you know what I mean?

I'm incredibly neurotic and a control freak. I like the thought that if there's going to be anyone to blame it's going to be me.

Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?