We almost need to cultivate - I hate to sound New Age-y - but to cultivate a positive bias, and really work to focus on those things and notice those things that are wonderful and uplifting.

If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.

The good thing about not being drop-dead gorgeous is that as time passes, I don't have much to worry about. I have friends who are actors and every day they look in the mirror with trepidation.

I find London really exciting but there's a lot of vicious success here. Like New York, there's a lot of incredibly successful people who feel incredibly entitled, perhaps justifiably, but I don't want to be around viciously entitled people.

My goal is to make one-not a hodgepodge, but just the sort of record that I would want to listen to.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

There is a dysfunctional strangeness to Los Angeles that doesn't exist in any other western city. The roads are crumbling, no-one knows what they're doing, the city government barely works.