When I was pregnant, I felt filled with life, and I felt really happy. I ate well, and I slept well. I felt much more useful than I'd ever felt before.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

It's striking how commercially viable that impulse for instant intimacy is right now, especially in songs and writing.

I had some fears as a kid, but I was also relatively fearless. Maybe that's a result of living half the time in reality and the other half in fantasy.

Writing in other voices is almost Japanese in the sense that theres a certain formality there which allows me to sidestep the embarrassment of directly expressing to complete strangers the most intimate details of my life.

I was the oldest child, and both my parents worked, so I had a great deal of responsibility from a very young age.

Kindness to me is only powerful if it has the cruel streak behind it. If someone is kind all the time under all circumstances, they're just simple-minded. Kindness is only worth something if you have the cruel streak to back it up.