“If I had a choice, I would have wanted to be Debussy or Couperin. I listen and it is magic. I just can't understand how they conceived enchantment. I couldn't so I decided to be a mathematician, the next best thing.”

“I felt like I was just not being myself. I felt like I was hiding. I was hiding from me. I was hiding from sparkle and magic and fun and fearlessness and music and dance and creative magic… I just knew I had feelings. I knew I had thoughts. I knew I had things I wanted to say. Listen, I'm rebellious. Okay? I always have been. And Erika Jayne is a little bit of a rebel too.”

“I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing - I went into politics. It's practically the same thing.”

“I don't understand how people can stand next to you one year, and next year, they cannot. They're going crazy, screaming. They can't take it that you're there. But last year I was in the same club, walking around, lonely. Couldn't get a date or a dance. I was too skinny, too something, and now, "He's just adorable. He's just, oh!”

“The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can't understand it, so I just trust myself to it; and forget about it.”

“I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.”

“I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”

“I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.”

“Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.”

“I would watch Wizard of Oz, like every day, when I was two. I had a hard time understanding that I couldn't go into the film, because it felt so real to me.”