No fish can swim until the King is born, until the King is born in Tupelo.

I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.

If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.

The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

I don't know, maybe Australian humour isn't supposed to be funny. It's as dry as the Sahara, and I think people miss that.