I work way too hard in the gym to woo the judges and just skate by.
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
'Battlefield' was one of those slow-building songs, the way 'Tattoo' was. It was kind of a word-of-mouth hit. The more people heard it, the more they started requesting it on the radio.
Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.
Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me.
Most workouts are way too aggressive. Thousands of lunges wear out the body.
I think my songs serve a purpose in a very therapeutic way to do with relationships, very different to do with my opinions on world affairs.
As the world changes, the way we work changes with it.
At a time when club music has gone more electronic, I've gone the other way: organic and world music.
Certain celebs manage to worm their way out of the spotlight, and I won't stand for that.
The way that worms and viruses spread on the Internet is not that different from the way they spread in the real world, and the way you quarantine them is not that different, either.
Spring starts in January in the Ozarks, lurches on in a complicated way, with spurts and setbacks, until May. Then, early in May, there is a cold spell known as blackberry winter because it comes when blackberries bloom. It is a worrisome week for anyone who farms.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
I know girlfriends of mine who, when they were approaching pregnancy and starting a family, consistently went through a period right beforehand that was a last gasp kind of thing where they just wreak havoc. They fall apart, in a profound way, because there's some awareness that that's the last time they can do that for awhile.
I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society.
In 1874, Mary Fraser accompanied her husband Hugh to Hong Kong, arriving hours after a typhoon had wrecked the island. Some 10,000 boat families had drowned in the harbour. There was no way to avoid the bloated bodies, and when Mary disembarked, she felt her foot land on something soft.
Maybe its a case of one guitar feeling a certain way to the hands that makes one subsequently move differently over the strings, but my intent is always to wring the maximum emotional resonance out of the object in hand.
Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.
I love to draw and paint. I'm very active in that way, but I'm not very good with the written word, though.
