After years of hotels, I'm horribly inept at cleaning up after myself.

Mowing your lawn is against nature.

I wish I could just relax sometimes and make some money, but I always feel like I have to prove some kind of big, profound point.

I personally don’t have the ability to lie about my life, for better or for worse.

When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.

I was reared on folk music.

You had to be an over-the-top, demanding, dramatic figure in order to progress as a woman in Europe over the last few hundred years. Now people say, "You're being such a prima donna," meaning you're being hard to deal with or crazy. It's a bit sexist.