Tori Amos

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.

I felt sidelined by the industry, by the preoccupation with finding something newer, younger.

After a while of getting jerked around, you realize what the business is really made up of.

When I play live, it's a conversation that we're all having with the song, and the audience... their response and relationship with the songs is as valid as my relationship with the songs.

This was a time frame when dance music and clubs were having a real impact on culture, and it had an impact on me.

I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.

When I was little, my mom tells me, I used to say things like, 'Mom do you hear the string section? Do you hear the string section?' And she would look at me and say, 'No honey, I don't know what you're talking about.'

If you have an issue with homosexuality, then it comes to your own fear and your own darkness.

I find that in the 21st century, there's not a lot of compassion for what other people are going through or the walk that they have to walk.

I guess my husband is a muse as well.

The pop world has really opened its doors.

At 15, I knew someone whose mother cooked macrobiotic, so I persuaded my mother to go macrobiotic with me.

I don't really cook. There are caterers, and my husband cooks.

I've been known to throw watermelons, backstage, at people who are giving me news I don't want to hear. But I never aim for the head.

My father was a preacher in Maryland and we had crab feasts - with corn on the cob, but no beer, being Methodist - outside on the church lawn.

I was two and a half when I first climbed up and sat at a piano.

I'm a conduit for telling people's stories. It's a privilege.

When I got older, I chose to look at Christianity as another myth.

Some of the biggest advocates for feminism seem to believe that in order to feel powerful you have to make another woman subservient, and that is not what feminism is about at all.

I don't kid around.

I've carved out a career for myself really as a writer.

I don't want to give too much ink to foolish men.

You can be self-empowered and still learning about how you think about things daily.

There are two ways to wake up. You can wake up thinking about what you know, or you wake up thinking and saying 'What can I learn?.' That's a very different approach.

The fact that religion plays such a part in how people vote troubles me, troubles me as a minister's daughter. Because I always felt that the separation of church and state was what our forefathers and foremothers really fought for.

I don't know if the average person really has faith in Washington anymore.

When you don't have people in your life pushing you, can you push yourself?

I think you need to have people around you whose standard is high and who don't accept anything less.

There are enough scary rock & roll mothers in the world.

There is an energy that you carry when you're nurturing another life where you're protecting first - and once you know that cub is out of the way of the hunter's gun, you can be a little more daring.

I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.

I want to be an integrated woman.

My husband doesn't know what my songs are about - even when they're about him. He's very British in that way. He doesn't ask, and he doesn't want to be told.

Being able to still make records is a privilege. I don't take it casually.

I don't see music as working.

I'm not not going to stop giving away what I feel about something.

I know people sometimes have this fantasy about Cornwall. But the Cornish are so grounded.

Cornwall is one of the most beautiful places, with great people - there's not a great downside to it.

You don't leave people who can't defend themselves.

After a while, though, you realize that a whole slew of young singer-songwriter piano players are getting compared to you. That's when you feel the passage of time is occurring.

Well, I have a lot of food references in my work.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other.

Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.

People listen to music the way they want to listen to music.

I think doing variations on a classical theme is a dangerous thing to do.

I get tired of wearing the same thing all the time too.

Music is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the culture.

I wanted to do something creatively, having been a beached whale for many months and nursing my daughter.

It's fun to write your set list 20 minutes before and keep the crew very much on their toes.