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" At school I was an anti-magnet for women. "

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" The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else. "

" My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that. "

" As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup. "

" Everything that's said against me offends me, whether it's true or not. "

" I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion. "

" I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music. "

" Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say. "

" There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe. "

" L.A. is full of screenwriters. I don't know why. On many levels, it's such a thankless occupation. "

" I suspect the older you get the more invisible you become. "

" I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really. "

" What you're really after when you see a film or listen to a song is a singular vision, and I'm not sure how much of that you really get in Hollywood. "

" Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act. "

" The guitar is something you kind of embrace, and the piano is something you kind of - when you play it, you sort of push it away. It feels very different. "

" I'm hugely self-critical in the morning. "

" I'm a big fan of teatowels and am always on the lookout for a good one. "

" The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood. The way it works is that people get an idea you could possibly do something, but there's a one-in-a-hundred chance that it could get made. "

" I'm a kind of hard-wired pessimist. I can't help but see the world in a certain kind of way. "

" My music has to do with beauty, and it's intended to, if not lift the spirits, then be a kind of a balm to the spirits. "

" Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life. "

" No, I wouldn't direct a movie, no. I couldn't. I don't have the patience for it, I don't have the people skills. You have to be clever. I'm not really clever in that kind of way. And you have to be able to manipulate people, but at the same time allow them to feel like they are manipulating you, to get the kind of movie that you want. "

" The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike. "

" I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with. "

" At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out. "

" I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books. "

" When you're making a film, there are so many people involved that you get opinions and notes from people and you don't even know who they are. I find that quite difficult and it wears you down. "

" There's always pain around. That's one thing you can guarantee in life - there will always be a surplus of pain. "

" The only person who can say they're happy getting old is someone who isn't actually old yet. Every day, I get less and less happy about that idea. "

" It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia. "

" I would hate to think my songs were giving advice to people. "