I couldn't live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, 'cause I had been to art college.

My music is a mix of everything, mostly my own life. I just write about things that mean something and that I can write about. There's no point in pretending.

There's no point in bringing together a talented band if you don't let them do their thing.

Oh my god, it's good to be alive!

Burlesque is beautiful: It's art, it's fun, it's done with a lot of comedy - an awful lot of big wink-wink and nudge-nudge.

I love to have no plans. It is amazing where your day can turn when you have no plans: meeting people or just going to a little pub on the side of the road.

It is a huge danger to pretend that awful things do not happen. But you need enough hope to keep going. I am trying to make hope. Flowers grow out of darkness.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

An Academy Award nomination is stuff dreams are made of.

I think I do better when I sing.

Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.

I'm incredibly enthusiastic about the normalization, I think it's very promising. But I do think there are some worrisome aspects.

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[A] free government . . . cannot be supported without Virtue.

My dad always told me to play hard and know that the people you're competing with and against are working just as hard or harder. So don't let them out-work you.

If anyone could look into my head See or feel the dread that has captured Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain They would only turn away Turn away.