"I'm not frightened of anybody, I'm not intimidated by anybody, but if everyone is nice to me then I'll be nice back."

"I'm afraid of happy people. They're chemically unbalanced."

"I'm sweet, but f*ck with me and I'll mop the floor with you."

"Speech is my absolute lifeline and I felt like I'd lost my personality, been stripped completely of me; I felt invisible." (About having a cyst removed from her vocal chords)

"The truth is, I've always been wracked with self-loathing and terrible, paralysing depression." (Talking about her childhood years and the terrible self-image she had as a child)

"Until, I think, everyone in that school thought I was less than human. I felt ugly, weak, overwhelmed - I couldn't imagine being capable of doing anything. I certainly never thought I could be in a band. This was a dream it didn't even occur to me to dream about." (1998, Select Magazine)

"A lot of celebrities just want money, fame, power, fancy cars, houses all over the world and have people bow down to them. To me, that's frightful behaviour."

"A lot of people these days are not music lovers - they just want to be famous which is a very different thing to what I grew up believing in."

"I am not a sexy woman, I'm not beautiful, I'm not a sex kitten, I don't flirt with people, yet I've been tagged more of sex symbol than women who truly are and I that's solely because I don't reveal too much: people are curious."

"I couldn't feel good about myself hanging out in Armani clothes when my girlfriend can't even pay her heating bill. I'd feel foul and I'd be embarrassed."

"Here am I. I'm 38. My career's probably never been better. And I've made a decision which may or may not impact on it - I refuse to hide my experience and my age, as if it's something I should be ashamed of. I'm alive. I know lots of people who've never been lucky enough to get to this stage in their life. And I'm not gonna hide it for anybody." (about being almost 40)

"Also, I'm not homey, I'm really adaptable, so I'm really well-equipped emotionally to deal with the pressures that come with being in a band."

"And then there's all these other creeps that surround your band and suck off you like leeches and try to manipulate you and your business. You have to watch like a hawk. I'm always ready to fight. I see it very much as a battle."

"At the end of the day, though, the band members have to be strong. It's down to the individuals in the unit. Listen to me, I'm talking like I'm in the army and this is my squadron."

"I am a contradictory mess but I see it as my prerogative to change my mood like the weather."

"I am laughably aggressive, and the rest of the band is very laid back, so we mix well."

"I don't think it's good to encourage people to expect to see women on front covers without their clothes on... I don't have any problem with women doing it, if they want to, but for me personally I find it uncomfortable."

"I don't think they can deal with someone being complex and contradictory; it's not acceptable, you have to be a cartoon, a stereotype."

"I feel the same way I did when I was in school. I'm having the same insecurities. They don't go away just because they call you a sex symbol."

"I have a lot of very close girlfriends and sisters - I'm from an all female family. My father often quips that even the cat was neutered!"

"My niece was seven when she died of cancer and my sister-in-law - her mom - used to hear R.E.M.'s Everybody Hurts on the radio all the time she was in the hospital. She fell in love with the record and she listened to it all the time."

"No, I like being a role model because I know how much comfort my musical idols brought me."

"No, I'm not Shirley the girl, I'm the woman on MTV with the big boots."

"Oh, yeah, I'm the ridiculous pit bull."

"Possibly because I grew up not feeling very confident about my own physical appearance, I developed internal devices so that I could integrate into society."

"That's a difficult question, because to consider yourself a rebel is sort of ridiculous."

"The band turned into a real body. They give me things that I don't have, and I give them things that they don't have."

"The biggest compliment we've had recently was that we heard a lot of rappers and hip-hoppers are using the Garbage record as a reference point."

"We just wanted to make a record that sounded cool. So we stole from hip-hop, we stole from techno and blues and mashed them all up."

"You have to watch all sides of your advancement, you have to make sure people's bodies and minds are healthy and their morale is cool before you can really go out and play great music."

"I like the feeling that I'm giving young women self-confidence. It sounds so cliched, but it can be very moving."

"I love my boots, but you know, the boots are wearing me, baby, and that's gotta stop! It's a bit like the sorcerer's apprentice-the brooms started to do stuff on their own."

"I mean, I tend to do my own thing, and that usually crosses purposes with everyone around me."

"I think it's a great thing to have failed in life and then pulled yourself up by the boot straps and actually done something, because then you appreciate it more."

"I think music in general, and all types of art really, have always been about escapism-escaping the norm and asserting your own reality."

"I would say I'm pretty well at ease with my sexuality, but I'm an individual before I am a female."

"I'm fairly in control and I don't like to flirt particularly. I mean, obviously if I meet someone who I think is hot, of course I'll want to flirt with him, but in general I don't use it in day-to-day life."

"I've got a lot of stamina and I enjoy people, so having lots of people around doesn't freak me out."

"If you have any opinions at all or if you're even remotely verbal then they're going to call you fiery."

"It's definitely an intrinsic part of my makeup that makes me want to see black when everyone else is seeing white."

"Mozart was a punk, which people seem to forget. He was a naughty, naughty boy."

"Everybody likes to think of themselves as individual, the same way we would like to think of ourselves as individuals. When we first came out, everybody was saying, 'Oh you're Curve-like.' And we were like, No, we're not Curve-like. We're nothing like Curve. And now of course that the record has been so successful and we've overshadowed the curse of Curve, nobody's saying that to us anymore. When a band is young and it hasn't made it's own mark, then people will compare you to others. Always. That's just the way that the industry is set up. it's like taking two red-headed girls and saying, 'Oh they're so alike'. No two people are alike, no two bands are alike."
"That said, I do think out record caught people's attention and imagination. It caught people off guard and I think it sent a lot of people back to their holes to think again. If anything, that's where our record served a purpose. It made people look at technology in a new way and think, We can embrace this and modernise our music as we move as artists."