The pattern’s laid out on the bedWith dozens of colors of threadBut you’ve got the needleI guess that’s the point in the end

Thank God my best friend’s a therapist.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don’t have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

Everybody keeps talking about ‘fighting’ the cancer,” he said, “everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won...

There’s no blueprint; getting married doesn’t make you boring, having kids doesn’t make you boring, having money doesn’t necessarily have to make you boring.

Sometimes it was like Neil was from an alien planet, where people never asked for or shared anything emotional without deeply apologizing first. He assured me that he was simply British. And that we Americans,...

I’ve been in a recording studio enough times to know that it is not the best place to multitask. Doing a couple of takes of a song and running out to check your email to...

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

There’s something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There’s definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you’re afforded a degree of freedom in...

No” for an answer, you’re not really asking, you’re demanding — you’re begging. At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand asking.

Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.

There’s a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows.

If you stuck me in a room and gave me art-making tools but told me no one would ever see the results, I don’t think I’d have much desire to make art. What I do...

The field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.Which is to say: there are no rules.Or, rather, there are plenty...

I suppose I’m happy to sell my time and energy, but I’m not happy to sell my initial creative time.

I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that’s where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.

My number-one goal is to never feel like I’m strictly defining myself. The minute I feel like I’m doing that as anything – as theatrical, as feminist, as songwriter – I feel like the minute...

The challenge in my life really is keeping the balance between feeling creatively energized and fulfilled without feeling overwhelmed and like I’m in the middle of a battlefield.

I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.

I have never in my career embarked on a journey towards controversy. I have never deliberately set a flame.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

Meditation, especially for people who don’t know very much about it and think it’s this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and...

I’m a massive fan of David Lynch and ‘Twin Peaks.’

If you want the world to pay for projects, you have to be able to display why you’re worthy.

I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it’s great, but it’s also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.

I hate being ignored.

I get so many ideas for songs, but I’m so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

If you’re willing to take risks, Twitter is a vast amusement park of interesting life possibilities.

Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn’t new – bands have been doing it since the dawn of time.

The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.

Bands like Nirvana had theatrical sensibilities, playing with image, challenging assumptions people were making about them, the apex being Kurt Cobain in a dress to make a point.

One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and...

I don’t feel at home in New Orleans. I don’t feel at home in Austin or L.A. And I just felt immediately at home in northern Australia.

I’ve always been a creative workaholic. I have never had a period of my life where I didn’t have at least half a dozen projects going on at once.

I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is, which is that music has value, it’s subjective and we’re moving to a new...

People had this idea about becoming rock stars packing stadiums instead of having the goal of becoming what musicians used to be in terms of how they would perform and connect people.

To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what...

Twitter fascinates me because it’s real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.

The stage show is, in some sense, highly theatrical. It’s definitely not just a band in jeans playing rock and roll.

I’d actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing...

I have used Twitter for so many things, from places to stay, places to go, things to do, things I need, medical advice, you name it. Especially when I’m on tour, it really feels like...

Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me.Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you.But asking for help with gratitude says:We have the power to help each other.

Neil Gaiman swooped into my life though another friend, Jason Webley, who knew we were fans of each other’s work and introduced us via email. Neil and I, like me and Ben, just hit it...

I think I’ve been addicted to openness since long before my rock career. I was terrible as a teenager. I used to go out of my way to make people uncomfortable with personal details. I...

You get the feeling that on a lot of days the audience for most music would kind of rather not be faced with the artist, especially because we’ve been educated to think that the artist...

In some way, my fundamental feeling about music is that it’s impossible to put a price tag on it. Human beings made music before they made a lot of other things, including tools.