I'm going to trust my instincts when something's wrong.

Every international meeting or championship I do, I can cope a lot better because I can say I did the 100 m. hurdles, opened up the athletics at an Olympic Games in front of a home crowd, 80,000 people.

It's crazy because it's a British record and a personal best, but I wanted that 2 m. I cleared the 1.97 m. first attempt with space, so I think I could have done a little better.

I'm trying my best.

You don't have to be a bodybuilder to have strength in your muscles.

I actually hated dancing. My mum used to have to bribe me to go by buying me things. A year before I stopped going, I was going to go for an audition with the Royal Ballet. It turned out I was a year too young. Because I was tall, they thought I was older. But before I had the chance to go back, I quit.

My mum was a dancer. She would tour the world with a group, and she had me in a dance class when I was still in a nappy. They told her to come back when I could walk.

At primary school, it was always me and this other girl, Lauren, who would fight over who was the fastest every year. I was quicker, but for some reason, she always got the glory leg in the relay team. That used to annoy me.

This is my job. I just wake up, and I train.

I was one of those girls in class who always had her hair in plaits, was always with the boys, always playing football in the street.

It was just me and my mum growing up, and my mum's always said that's why I'm so mature. We were best friends, and if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't even have started athletics, because she wanted me to have a hobby.

There's a big debate whether pentathlon or heptathlon is harder: five events in one day or seven in two.

London 2012 was the biggest thing I will probably ever do, but I didn't realise it at the time!

I remember going down the tunnel into the Olympic Stadium and getting a glimpse of all the people and hearing all the noise, all the people shouting for us. I'd seen Usain Bolt on the warm-up track, and then, as I walked into the stadium, I sort of realised how big it was!

Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time.

I have a theory that there are still parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age of between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up.

But I don't have a very good track record with royalty. My dress fell off in front of Prince Charles at the Prince's Trust, so I'm just living up to my reputation.

I think quotes are very dangerous things.

It's so fascinating to think about how each snowflake is completely individual - there are millions and millions of them, but each one is so unique.

I'm a very strong person, and I think that's why, actually, I find it really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown' or 'She's not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature.'

Sometimes when I'm going to the supermarket to get the coffee and cat litter, I get freaked out and see all these people staring, and you turn around and there's, like, 40 people all looking at you... and when you go around the corner, they're all following you! You start freaking out like a trapped animal.

I think we all feel geeky at times, don't we? Isn't that all a part of the wonderful tapestry of life?

I have to say I find it totally astounding that my albums do as well as they do. It's quite extraordinary, and it's actually very touching for me for the albums to be received with such warmth.

I'm the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet.

I do have the odd dream where I'm on stage and I've completely forgotten what I'm meant to be performing - so they are more nightmares than dreams.

School was a very cruel environment, and I was a loner. But I learnt to get hurt, and I learnt to cope with it.

I love being with my friends, relaxing and talking.

Touring is an incredibly isolated situation. I don't know how people tour for years on end. You find a lot of people who can't stop touring, and it's because they don't know how to come back into life. It's sort of unreal.

I didn't really feel that there were any filler tracks on 'The Red Shoes,' but if I were to do that album now, I wouldn't make it so long.

It's not important to me that people understand me.

My parents weren't keen on the giving up of school at the beginning to go into singing and dancing, but once they saw I was serious about it, they gave support. I was quite stubborn about my decision, and in the end, they realised it was for the best.

That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries.

It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

I don't really see myself as a celebrity, but more as a sort of mitre.

My music can be a little obscure. It does worry me that the music might be too complicated for people to take in - that they have to work too hard at it.

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.

I think it's important that things are flawed.

I've read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don't think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time.

The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was, which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play. It became very important to me not to lose sight of that.

Quite understandably, people think that if there's a six-year gap or whatever, that it's taken me six years to make the album. It's not really like that at all.

I don't aim for perfection. But I do want to try and come up with something interesting.

I think snow is so evocative and has such a powerful atmosphere.

I was writing from the age of 10, and I was never really into going to discos and dances and stuff. I never told anyone at school that I did that because I feared it would alienate me even more.

The freedom you feel when you're actually in control of your own music is fantastic.

Since I was 17, I had been just making records and promoting them.

In your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty. It does make you feel differently.

Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is.

Whenever I see the news, it's always the same depressing things.

The music industry is in such poor shape; it's in a really bad way, and a lot of people in the industry are very depressed.

I'll always be tough on myself.