Eliot Sumner

“I only wear black. I think it suits me.”

“I sometimes suffer from insomnia, and one of the first times it ever happened, I was like, 'I don't know what to do with myself,' so I started writing a song, and by morning, it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.”

“I picked up the guitar when I was 4, and from then, I could never be bored.”

“I write most of my stuff when I'm on a train or a plane, any mode of transport. I like trains because you hear this motoric rhythm and the scenery is great. You go into your own little world. You don't have to be anywhere else.”

“I make my songs slightly abstract so that people can interpret them their own way. I think that's a lot more special, so you can hear a song and think, 'I feel exactly that way,' even if it wasn't written for that feeling.”

“I didn't come out as gay; I came out as I don't really believe in gender.”

“In 2009, I fractured my skull in a freak accident at an L.A. restaurant. I suffered a seizure and was rushed into hospital. I was so out of it that I refused to let them scan my brain. My dad rushed to my bedside and talked me into having the CAT scan - he told me that I might die if I didn't go through with it.”

“I'm very shy and awkward; I can't have a normal conversation, and then people think I'm being a bit rude, but really I'm not.”

“Music is about self-expression and representing the times, and I think fashion is the same. It took me a long time to find my own style, both in terms of fashion and music.”

“With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.”

“I started listening to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young when I was 8 or 9 years old - I had siblings that gave me good music instead of the crap that was on the radio in the '90s.”

“My French is terrible, and my Spanish is even worse. I find Spanish really difficult. They speak so quickly, whereas in German, it's very clear what they're saying. It's easier to repeat.”

“I would make documentaries if it was a worthy cause. I have a lot of respect for people who put themselves in harm's way to make people see that something needs to be done.”

“It's not a nice thing to have a song written about you.”

“I wear a lot of black. Like my heart.”

“I'm an extremist. I don't do things in halves. I don't moderate anything. That can be with work or with good things as well. But often, I take it a bit too far.”

“I don't particularly like attention. I like to do things on my own. I like to dress myself. People always ask that at shoots: 'Do you want any help?' That's the weirdest question.”

“For me, Paul Simon has always been an incredible songwriter, as he writes very complicated songs that sound very simple, and he makes it look so easy when it's not.”

“I think I have a lot of energy, and most of it is quite aggressive energy. But in a positive way, I think. It's like a positive aggression.”

“I like to write from a slightly sad or complicated place. But with a sense of hope and happiness at the same time.”