“I don’t want (my music) to be a political or social thing right away. Eventually I would love to mess with that, but it’s a tricky, tricky road. There’s a part of me that’s a businessperson and part of me that’s an artist, and the artist wants to push buttons and break boundaries, but the businessperson goes, ‘Well, that doesn’t really sell albums.’ I don’t want to alienate a bunch of people who would otherwise be into what I do.”

“Admit it – it feels really good to say ‘cunt’. There’s just something so strong about the word, with its biological directness and monosyllabic oomph. It has a blunt power that makes it perversely fun to toss off, even if you never want to blurt it in any serious setting that could get you yelled at.”

“The women in American cable news look like a beauty pageant. I’m not very pretty. I sorta look like a dude, and I have short hair, and I wear boring gray jackets, and I have a big nose. No one’s gonna confuse me with a Fox News anchor. No one’s gonna call me the anything-Honey.”

“It’s never crossed my mind that it’d ever be possible for me (to get married). That’s the scar that I and so many others bear – we believed ourselves to be second-rate citizens for so long, the idea of being able to say ‘This is my husband, these are my children’ was not an option. I remember Tom Stoppard saying to me when I came out, ‘I feel so sorry for you, because you’ll never have children.’ These days I would say, ‘Well, why not, Tom?’ But 20 years ago I accepted his judgment.”