I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional.

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

Let's get one thing straight: there's no such thing as the Bristol sound.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn't feel like it's about me. Time created a distance.

The music comes first. When Geoff has made something the inspiration comes automatically. His music is very expressive. But still is is a very difficult process: I have to add something to his music, not push it away. It has to be equal, and I find that very difficult.

I've had a wordless phase, and that's still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.

There's not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.

We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.

I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional.

I still don't like doing interviews. I hardly do any... I hope this will be the last one for a long while.

I think that after a year of Portishead I've become a little more sober.

I try to imagine how we would live if we didn't know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around.

I've just put my heart and soul in a song and need at least a week to recover.

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.

The only real failure to me is if you don't finish something.

The idea of the mulatto has been a gathering point for a wide variety of racial prejudices, fears, myths, and speculations.

Let's stop talking about crisis. Let's work instead.

All people have feelings, they are not there to be used. If you're not longer interested in someone, they have the right to be informed before you go and cheat or go looking elsewhere.

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

They changed the floor back to old school. They changed the uniform back to old school. Somebody tell the damn players to start playing like old school.

The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.

Be gentle to all and stern with yourself.

I'd love to do comedy.

I think the level of devotion some sci-fi fans display turns other people off.

The battle is on, and nothing less than the soul of America is at stake.

If you're talking about nuclear physics, I have to defer to the next guy. But if you're talking about football, I don't have to take a back seat to anyone.

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.

Is the American theatre allowing itself to become irrelevant? The problem isn't that playwrights aren't being paid enough. It's that theatres all over America are looking towards New York to tell them what new plays to do.

I'm in the retail business, not the circus business.

A career path is rarely a path at all. A more interesting life is usual a more crooked, winding path of missteps, luck and vigorous work. It is almost always a clumsy balance between the things you try to make happen and the things that happen to you.

No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.

My parents separated when I was younger.

You know, I just tend to do the scene that I'm given, really. If it really needs it, then I'll go to them and ask 'What's she talking about? What's she referring to?' But often they don't know, or they do know and they're not going to tell me, so I've learned just to work with what I'm given.

I used to walk through the Old Times Square fearing for my life. Now I wouldn't be caught dead there.

I didn't want to chase movies. It's too hard. You've got to work at it - opening nights, photo shoots, publicity people, managers. I never wanted to do that. I'm too lazy.

For me, being memorable is more important than winning.

School just speeds things up... Without school it might take 70 years before you wake up and are able to count.