Making the inner meet the outer is the function of the artist.

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.

Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.

The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world."

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

If I win the Mercury Prize, I'll be very honoured. If I don't win it, I won't have lost it. Someone else will have won it. And that will also be good.

When I think about Edmonton, Silver Street and Pymmes Park, the old people whose faces are so unhappy, it pushes me to be better. I want to be better to help places like this.

I always try to be as discreet as possible, so I wear black.

I'm a very honest person, and I'm quite emotional for a man. If I want to say something, I'll say it.

I started writing music in a French way: more focused on lyrics than melody.

I don't have a flat anywhere. I'm registered in the U.K. for tax purposes, I suppose, and my mail goes to my parents.

It's my only freedom, music, and I'm not going to give it up to anyone else.

I do music to tell people my thoughts and opinions about life, emotions, politics, everything.

I realised that we're all equal - it's all about helping each other.

Paris is very dear to me, and I'll never forget Paris.

I grew up as a man because I was by myself.

I just want us to understand each other. That's the point of my music.

In Paris, I was really singing for the sake of living. But eventually people said, 'Keep going; you've got a great voice,' and I started having confidence in my voice all of a sudden. That's when I started creating my own music.

I adopted this feeling that the stage is my home, so just keep my coat on and not wear anything else.

I never thought I'd say this, but to any child listening, the world is your oyster.

I'm literally nowhere yet... When things started going well, this French designer called Ami gave me some shoes and clothes to wear. But when I sat down to play the piano, the very new shoes kept slipping off the pedal. So I took them off, threw them away, and have never worn shoes while playing the piano from then on.