With touring, it's like you're in this car and you've got this much fuel. You know that if you drive carefully and take your time and search your way so that you don't take the wrong turn, you'll have exactly enough fuel to go where you're going. You are empowered as you go by your audience.

I suppose musicians have the kind of arrogant attitude that they can actually offer the world something, because through their passive power, they're able to be the strongest arms that they can be, incredibly strong. That's what keeps us going.

I feel connected to every other creative element because I have a creative soul. My isolation is not through the work it's through not being able to connect with mediocrity. When I was younger I was a punk and then when I got married and had children I became a mother. They are the only two memberships to any clan-like cultures that I have ever embraced.

There's something extremely fragile about musicians, and that's their strength.

It is the artist's responsibility to be the oracle, to abstract where you are - that is our responsibility - we're not there to look glamorous. We're there to tune into the frequency of the Earth and the connective tissues of those things that we are responding to - language, colour, costume, literature, poetry, cuisine, perfume - these are the things that make up the desire to throw paint on a canvas, these are the things that create the excitement for building a new language!

There's fatigue but also a deliberate desire to want to reach absolute perfection at every concert.

There's the false security of feeling a great force of love from your audience one day and then the next morning you wake up and you're exhausted, and that love is something you have to reach for the next day.