To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It's exhausting.

I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.

Everyone wants to feel that they matter.

My music has to do with beauty, and it's intended to, if not lift the spirits, then be a kind of a balm to the spirits.

The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.

I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.

If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.