Clown' was written when I couldn't find anyone who believed in me as an artist. Maybe those labels will think twice next time a young songwriter comes along.

You've got the words to change a nation but you're biting your tongue

It would be sad if we lost our instinct and our courage to love and protect.

I wasn't intentionally trying to create my own path or be original, it was just I needed to say certain things and I needed to express myself, and that's how it came out.

I tried to bang down a lot of doors but Virgin were the only label who believed in what I was doing. I ended up with the label that understood what I was trying to do.

Sometimes you feel like a very small drop in this huge ocean.

I want to speak for people that may not feel like they're being spoken for at the moment. And I want to make a connection between the world around us and the charts.

From when I was a kid I wanted to write. It was so important to me that I was writing my own material.

Any song I have to work on longer than a day, I just leave it. It's not gonna work. Everything that's good is really instant.

I was very quiet until I got at the piano, and weekends, lunch breaks, after school, before school, I was just making music.

I'd be smiling if I wasn't so desperate. I'd be patient if I had the time.

I am fighting to stay alive not because I fear death, but because I love life.

In fairy tales the evil characters disappear or die, in reality, evil spreads while you wait for your hero on a horse, only to realise the sword to save yourself was always in your hand...

I like stories about supervillains. They teach children that you can accomplish great things even when the whole world is against you.

In Washington, DC, politics dominate even the most casual conversations.

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

you couldn't talk yourself into love any more than you could talk yourelf out of it.

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

I wanted to be left alone to live my life, so it was very easy for people to pretend that they were me.

True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed on us by law.

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.