As we become this one global culture, in some ways it's things like the weather and nature that still hold our culture as unique to where we are.

I was aware of a lot of my friends being into things I wasn't into. Like sarcasm. It had never been a part of my family - they still don't use sarcasm.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

I think it's almost a law of nature that there are only certain things that hit an emotive space, and that's what was always special for me about music: it made me feel something.

In a popular medium, you're going to get loads of stuff that is trite, but there'll also be some really special moments.

I love being a mother. I think it's the best thing I've ever done, and I personally feel that it's had a very positive effect on my work. I think it's an encouraging force for creativity, it feeds creativity - it did for me, certainly.

I suppose I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person, and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world.

I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don't mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn't need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on.

I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to be thought provoking.

I am just a quiet reclusive person who has managed to hang around for a while.

One of the main reasons for wanting to perform live again was to have contact with that audience.

For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life. It's so a part of who I am.

If you believe in what you do and you really want to be in music, just stick at it. It's always a learning process. Enjoy it because I think making music is a privilege, really. In an ideal world, it should also always be fun. As much as possible, make it fun.

There's always ideas buzzing around, but it's whether they actually end up materialising into a song.

If I could make albums quicker, I'd be on a roll wouldn't I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don't know why. Time... evaporates.

I don't get out to parties often.

Thanks to everyone who's encouraged and supported my work over the years.

I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn't really going out and seeing people.

For me, having a child is a really great responsibility because you've got something there that is depending on you for information and love until a certain age when it goes to school.

I could find faults with all my albums because that's just a part of being an artist - it's hard being a human being, isn't it?

Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.

I think I was just lucky to be brought up in a very musical family. My two older brothers were, and still are, very musical and very creative, and music was a big part of my life from a very young age, so it is quite natural for me to become involved in music in the way that I did.

I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being.

When I was signed, that was before the punk thing even happened.

I really love Hitchcock; I think he was a complete genius, to me one of the best directors. Such a sense of how to put things together.

I listen to very little music, particularly contemporary. If I listen to it, it's going to be my own music, some arrangement or something. I spend so much time listening that the way I relax is by watching things, a comedy; that's my way to wind down.

We have such little mystery in our lives generally because of how we live now. I mean, of course, mystery is all around us, but the way we live our lives now, we're too busy to be bothered with it.

When your mother dies, you're not a little girl any more.

I'm not sure there are a lot of things I'd want a manager for. I suppose I feel that at least the decisions I make are coming from me, and I'm not put into a situation that I wouldn't want to be in.

I don't read newspapers, and I've said I don't watch the news. I love books, but I don't read much. What I do is I get people to read to me, and I put the stories in my head.

I wasn't an easy, happy-go-lucky girl because I used to think about everything so much, and I think I probably still do.

I understand that people want to just listen to a track and put it on their iPod, and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but why can't that exist hand in hand with an album? They're such different experiences.

I suppose the worst case scenario is that people will get to the point where they can't actually afford to make what they want to make creatively. The industry is collapsing.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.

Famously cancer fighting, laden with vitamins, minerals, soluble fiber, and phytonutrients, broccoli and its relatives are among the healthiest ingredients of the human diet.

Even more than dying itself, I'm scared of the horror-movie changes that happen to the human body as it ages. I think of it as a sort of haunted-house effect, living inside a crumbling, creaking structure that is full of ghosts and will, some day, fall down.

Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.

Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I'm a snob, it's about quality, not cuisine.

After a day of writing, I love nothing more than to go into my kitchen and start chopping onions and garlic on the way to cooking an improvised meal with whatever ingredients are on hand. Cooking is the perfect counterpoint to writing. I find it more relaxing than anything else, even naps, walks, or hot baths.

The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.

Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it's important to wait, because once it's picked, it can't ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous.

It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.

Of course, eating broccoli raw, nutritionally and aesthetically speaking, is no doubt the best way of all. Raw broccoli makes a delectable salad when sliced into thin strips on a mandolin, marinated in lemon-mustard vinaigrette, then tossed with toasted pecans or hazelnuts, halved cherry tomatoes, and fresh minced basil.

Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.

My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.

Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike, stalky vegetable.

A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.

There are two kinds of ham: raw and cooked. Raw ham is cured with salt and/or smoke over time; cooked ham is boiled. Every culture that makes ham has its own unique and various methods.

I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.

Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.