I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.

I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess - I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.

I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.

Acting seems much easier than singing, in fact, because you are putting on a costume - whereas here you are taking everything off.

I'm a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood - I've carved two of my guitars.

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

I try to not listen to all the girls I admire musically - like Nina Simone - just so I don't find myself imitating them, even if it's subconsciously.