Keren Ann quotes:

Well, I grew up between Holland and Israel and then moved to France when I was eleven.

I spend a lot of time writing in New York.

It was an hour and a half plane ride, so I slept. I try to sleep because that's probably the only time I get to get my real sleep. When I can't sleep I read books or watch movies.

I was in the studio so much, it was about the search for air in a metaphoric sense, and the breathing has more to do with travel for me, about the search musically for open air.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

I think many experiences are bound to be failures, and sometimes I regret them before they even happen.

You have to love writing a song and architecture. You have to give it a form. It is my job to create a sonic landscape. I like to create ambiance and atmosphere. The writing is the intimate part of it. It is a sketch. The production is the whole painting.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

The first thing about a song is that it has to be real, be lived; it has to be emotional, and melancholic. I don't mean sad. Melancholy is sort of a comfort. Melancholy has a sort of beauty to it. This attracts me to every other form of art...

If I look at it, it's about being able to get lost in New York, to explore the city, to have more personal stories about New York, although some could also take place in Paris.

I'm very attached to Paris because I have a base there and am also recording there, but New York is home to me when I'm in the U.S., because it's nice to have a bed to go back to.

It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.

I think it's very good to have regrets, to learn how to live with them.

Everything is temporary. Everything is bound to end.

I believe that the beauty of repetition is something that is not explored enough yet.

I don't have a favorite place to play.

I like the fact that there is challenge.

I like the idea of having a calm, quiet room to work on my [art] while knowing that outside there's noise and a lot happening. It's reassuring to know the 'everyday' continues even though inside the studio you feel so disconnected from it.

I'm always on a train or a plane, so wherever I happen to be is home.

It's just trying everyday to do the best you can and to enjoy what you have with the mixture of the venue and the sound and the crowd.

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.

When you record, you live with what you recorded for many many years, but when you play it's just an hour and a half and then once it's over it's over.

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in.