Quotes from Toyah Willcox

I can't live in a world of dullards. So I think on that level, I'm definitely punk.

Punk helped musical fringes get attention. Stuff like Nirvana could never have happened without it.

I think very fast and visually and I have to write down an idea right away or it will be lost forever.

When I left home at 17, I became successful astronomically fast. But I think my parents were so frightened of me failing that they focused on that more than my success.

In my experience, women are conditioned to expect and accept that life will not only let them down, but they themselves will be the reason for their own downfall in the fullness of time.

Between 2007 and 2016, I had a large white rabbit called WillyFred. I was happiest pressing my ear to his fur and hearing his heart beat.

I've studied nutrition since I was 23 and I began to find that a lot of my eating habits were to do with boredom and frustrations rather than hunger. When I was thirsty I would eat rather than drink.

Melissa Caplan made my costumes from the 70s to the mid-80s. I was very influenced by futurism and reading a lot of Marge Piercy.

You either decide to age gracefully or not to age. I'm definitely the latter.

I was at stage school in Birmingham Rep when I was called down to London for an audition in the National Theatre. Maximilian Schell, the film actor, was casting Tales from the Vienna Woods. He was looking at me for a small, but significant, role.

New Orleans is thrilling. The history is as rich as the food.

I've lived with my dyslexia and gone on to have a successful recording career, but academically I never had a chance in hell because I didn't fall into that bracket.

I hated every minute of my schooldays.

I'd like young people to seek my advice, and trust that the decades I have lived through have added to my abilities to be a valuable contributor to the workplace and society.

If my 20s were a time when the way I looked was my calling card, then it feels as though my 60s will be a reinvention.

I remember my mother doing housework until four in the morning and then a couple of hours later taking me to school.

Getting older doesn't worry me, what does is getting unfit.

I have always fought against being gender specific. I just don't like being identified as female: I'm a person.

Until I was seven, I was very close to my mother because I was so ill and she had to teach me how to walk and talk. But then she had another child, a little girl called Fleur, who died. When she came home from hospital there was a bit of a distance between us. It was never talked about again.

In 2010 I had to learn to walk again when I had my legs made the same length, after living with one leg two inches longer than the other until the age of 51.

Punk is the voice that shouts the loudest from the silence of inertia.

I don't think my insomnia is fixable: I think it's in my DNA.

At one stage I was using crutches on stage and couldn't walk more than 20 yards but a hip replacement in 2010 sorted that out.

As a young child, my family holidays were always in Rock, Cornwall, with my parents, older brother Kim and sister Nicola.