Viv Albertine

“I can always go back to Jane Austen. 'Mansfield Park' is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.”

“It's amazing what your brain can do when all your senses are heightened.”

“I always felt very free about experimenting with clothes. I was into clothes in a big way from a young age. Not expensive but fun and experimental.”

“Truth is splintered.”

“I want to say to younger women especially that it's OK to be an outsider. It's OK to admit to your rage. You're not the only person walking down the street feeling angry inside.”

“I usually write at my kitchen table, nothing exotic. I don't need any equipment. I don't have to organise anyone else to rehearse, and when I do a reading, lots of women and girls come, whereas gigs are dominated by men. Not against men, but I want to communicate to women.”

“I can't stand these autobiographies that start with, you know, 'I was born in Acton, and I went to such and such a school.' They just bore me.”

“Punk was such an exciting time because there were no rules. You could go and knock on Sun Ra's door - and he was in the phonebook, under Ra!”

“I'm still angry at so much - class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.”

“I definitely thought the first book was going to be a one-off. I never thought I'd even write a book, not ever having aspired to be a writer. It's something that never occurred to me - a bit like it never occurred to me to play guitar when I was young. I just thought it was out of my league.”

“Punk inspired me.”

“I never thought of myself as a strong person until I wrote my first book, and people started to say, 'You're a survivor. You're such a strong person.' It never ever occurred to me.”

“I've had two great loves: my mother and my daughter.”

“I think, often, people who do something new creatively don't benefit financially from it - it's the people who come after and make them palatable that make money.”

“You've got one life: find your voice within it.”

“I've only done a handful of things in my life that have stood out. The rest is just broth: mistakes and boredom.”

“We were very deliberately not playing 12-bar structures, blues structures, which rock musicians turned into such a cliche. We tried to... listen to the rhythms within ourselves and take the normal words we used every day in our normal thoughts, which girls hadn't written about before.”

“The more blows you have in life, the better, because it means you're challenging yourself.”

“When you've fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.”

“The older I get, the more the lying, the losing touch with your true thoughts and feelings, and the compromises required to fit in seem not worth the effort. It's my one go on Earth; why spend any more of it conforming to other people's rules and ideals?”