"Early in our marriage my husband gave me The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Harvard University Press. What an amazement to see her poems in her own hand, intact in their radical, astonished beauty without the many editorial interventions made after her death which silently “corrected” and altered her grammar, idiosyncratic capitalization, punctuation, and much else. I could even see the alternate word-choices she left on the page—that feeling of the mind in motion. Recently, New Directions published The Gorgeous Nothings, which beautifully reproduces her late envelope writings and includes as well a photo of the small pencil she carried in the pocket of her dress—another book to treasure"

"Carolyn Cassady was the wife of Neal Cassady who is the hero in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” She was his wife, but also an artist and art teacher, and she was linked to this absolute lunatic of a man who was her Achilles heel. He regularly betrayed her, but you love who you love. She had a love affair with Kerouac as well—weirdly because Neal Cassady suggested it. She was an incredibly gifted writer, but she was managing these crazy men in her life and bringing up her children and I guess she didn’t see herself in that way. But she wrote with so much intuition and insight, and a lot of beauty as well."

"This record can adapt to almost anything I'm doing - I listen to it when I cook, when I shower, when hiking, but it's perhaps best for nighttime, I have a cocktail in my hand, and I'm looking over the city lights. It is cocktail music in a way, but very dark. It's a very soothing record, to the ears and the soul. I actually put it in a metal category, even though it's more jazz, because the mood of it is so dark. They're opposites, but it works. In music that I make, even if it's subconsciously, I try to bring together the beauty and the dirtiness of rock. I love the contrast and dynamic of that."

"It seems I’ve been watching Children of Paradise all my life. I remember taking my son to see it when he was seven. When I was trying to convince Brando to play Garrett in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, he told me that, along with the master swordsman in Seven Samurai, the thief in Children of Paradise was the greatest performance on film. I came to Port of Shadows much later in my life, and the Criterion transfer really enhanced its beauty. Jean Gabin became a prototype for me of a kind of actor difficult to find today. And the dialogue inspired me to attempt to re-create its poetic realism."

"It seems I’ve been watching Children of Paradise all my life. I remember taking my son to see it when he was seven. When I was trying to convince Brando to play Garrett in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, he told me that, along with the master swordsman in Seven Samurai, the thief in Children of Paradise was the greatest performance on film. I came to Port of Shadows much later in my life, and the Criterion transfer really enhanced its beauty. Jean Gabin became a prototype for me of a kind of actor difficult to find today. And the dialogue inspired me to attempt to re-create its poetic realism."

"This record was the precursor to my operatic downfall when I was 13. Before opera there was Annie Lennox - she inhabited that realm of drama and beauty and the ephemeral. So I was obsessed with that record and I think also, even though at the time I wasn't necessarily aware of my sexuality, it definitely spoke to this self-discovery that was bound to happen, regarding the tenuous nature of gender. That album cover with her looking like a man was just so life-changing – I imagine a bit like when people saw Bowie's record covers. For me, Annie Lennox in that macho pose made so much sense without me knowing what the hell it meant."

"It’s such an amazing record. I love Copenhagen on there, it just melts me. Though I said it’s hard to pinpoint influences, maybe at the end of Weird Dreams, the final track on my new album, I was doing my Scott Walker impression a bit. It’s an album I always come back to because of the mood. It’s light and dark: there’s beauty there, but the lyrics give it a real edge. You can get different things out of it. I hope I do that with my music in that it’s able to make you feel good, but if you really want to get into it you can relate to the darkness. I’m always looking for that balance."