You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

I'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one.

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

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.

You don't meet a lot of people that you really like. I don't anyway.