It's pretty weird when you are just touring all the time and you don't have a normal life. You're out of touch with reality too much.
Room service is nice. Ooh-la-la, a hotel. At home, it's laundry and school lunches.
The writing became a hobby in the background: it took a back seat to parenthood and being a person and being a human being.
I was a full-time mom for seven years. You go back on tour, you're back in hotels, you're ordering room service, and you're getting an itinerary slipped under your door every,day. You're kind of thinking, 'Did I go home for seven years, or was that just a dream?'
I lived in buses. I didn't really have anything else. I didn't feel like a female, and I ended up really kind of isolated. Everybody thinks you're so happy and so wealthy and such a big star, but you're really kind of lonely and don't know how to stop it.
There's always a party in my bus.
When the Greatest Hits came out and we did that tour, I just felt I wanted to take a break, totally. Probably because, as well, I was so young when I got famous. I did album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, then I had a public nervous breakdown where I just lost tons of weight.
I think there's a difference between somebody who grows up in Paris or London and goes to Los Angeles. But if you grow up in the green fields, and you rarely go into the city, you're so overprotected that when you do go to L.A., it's almost a bigger slap in the head.
I write about what is getting to me at the time, about the things you need to talk about, but which would sound silly if you sat down and told them to your friend. I only write for myself, to get my emotions out. It's self-therapeutic.
I love to go home to my kids. I don't have that lull in my life when I didn't have them.
When everybody's looking at you, it does your head in. When you're always on the inside, sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.
I don't appreciate people invading my privacy.
My priorities were taking the kids to school and being a mum and being a daughter and being a sister. Just spending a lot of that time with my family that I'd probably lost a lot of, touring with the Cranberries.
I am just trying to live for my kids. It is all about my kids now. I love them endlessly.
I'm an artist, and I need to work, like everybody. We need to be challenged and that we're getting up and doing something with our lives.
Sometimes your kids give you that shove out the door to do things that you need. Teenagers are good that way; they keep you in the loop.
I didn't know initially whether I'd like doing TV and whether I'd be able to work with other people. I've always done my own thing. I've never put myself into that situation, but it's the most fun I've had in years.
I was so young when I got so famous, and then I kind of put up a wall around myself. I didn't really want to show people any fragilities or fears; I was trying to be this tough person that I felt was expected of me.
It's important to take time off because it's a long journey this life, and I want to be singing in 30 years' time. You see a lot of artists who get caught up in the here and now, and they just burn themselves out, and I kind of did that myself with my third album.
For an artist or an entertainer, it's the ultimate when you can go to the forest when you're done your work and escape.
