It's tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, 'Oh, look, another quirky girl.'

You know, my mum's always encouraged me and never made my gender an issue, I guess. She brought me up to believe in equality, as opposed to feminism or sexism - so it just meant that my gender was not relevant to what I was capable of achieving.

I'm not a downtrodden woman. I just won't be.

When you research prolific songwriters, it is usually later in their career they write songs that they distance themselves from, or it's about other people.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing.

I didn't do my work for money or prizes - only for the excitement of discovery.

The whole year I was in LA I got into telemarketing and learned how to make money. Five years later that skill helped me make my first film.