I love being with my friends, relaxing and talking.
— Kate Bush
When I started music, I think it was responsible for keeping me sane, because training as a dancer really kept me in good spirits amid all the crazy stuff that happened when I first became popular.
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.
My friends sometimes used to ignore me completely, and that would really upset me badly.
In a popular medium, you're going to get loads of stuff that is trite, but there'll also be some really special moments.
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.
Whenever I see the news, it's always the same depressing things.
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 used to enjoy bad television, like really bad quiz programmes or sitcoms.
People weren't even aware that I wrote my own songs. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist.
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.
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.
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.
Gene Wilder is so funny.
I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to be thought provoking.
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 am just trying to be a good, protective mother. I want to give Bertie as normal a childhood as possible while preserving his privacy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't get out to parties often.
I'm the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet.
Albums are like diaries. You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time.
When your mother dies, you're not a little girl any more.
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.
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 think snow is so evocative and has such a powerful atmosphere.
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 want to be in a position where I can function as a human being.
My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music - Gershwin, all kinds of stuff.
I don't know about hiding away, but I really only like to present myself when I'm working on something - it's more my work I like to present to the world rather than myself.
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.
I have this desire in the back of my mind now of making music and film at the same time - putting the two together.
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 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 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 am just a quiet reclusive person who has managed to hang around for a while.
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.
Obviously I try to make the best music that I can, but after about two years of making an album, you start to worry: 'Is it going to come out all right? Is it all going to sound churned out?'
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.
In your teens, you get the physical puberty, and between 28 and 32, mental puberty. It does make you feel differently.
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.
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.
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.
When I was signed, that was before the punk thing even happened.
It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. I don't ever want to lose contact with that.
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.
People ask what I really did in the three years between 'The Dreaming' and 'Hounds of Love.' I spent it with my family, living a normal home life.
