In 1940 my mum took a job as under-matron at her old school, which had been evacuated from Eastbourne to Windermere; I got a bursary and spent eight years as a boarder. It was a smashing education; I regret being at a single-sex school, but I had a brother, so knew what guys were.

I got a guitar when I was 14. I made really, really, really bad music as a teen. I learned to play Smashing Pumpkins and Hole songs.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

My father played guitar, so I always wanted to play for that reason. But I think the biggest reason was just the '90s in general - growing up listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and bands like that, and going to concerts and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world.

It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

I got involved in improv comedy. It settled me down when I was getting wild. I was sort of an evil teenager smashing up my cars and drinking and driving, let's just say, a lot.

I've been asked about the glass ceiling a lot, and I don't think of myself as some kind of crusader going around smashing glass. I don't feel like I had to - and that is a very, very strong flag showing the people around me made it, so I didn't have to.

We like smashing genres into each other, so if you can find something that's really idiosyncratic in respect to superhero genre and you can smoosh it into it, you usually wind up with something fresh and different.

I come from a place where there's violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.

I idolised bands like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, who wanted to reach as many people as they could.

I was never able to get through Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I've never been able to make it through. And I love the Smashing Pumpkins, they're one of my favorite bands ever, but I've never been able to listen to the whole thing all the way through.

As far as women fighting in MMA, I don't like it when the division isn't deep. I don't like to see a woman who's so much better than everybody else smashing other women. That's tough to watch.

My guitar survived Kosovo, then I went to visit a record company back in London and fell off my motorbike with it on my back, smashing it to bits. I was travelling at two miles per hour.

To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply.

Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.

I was hospitalized five times in 2011 because of my skiing. Fracturing my left shoulder twice, snapping my anterior cruciate ligament once and smashing my scapula into five pieces.

In orthodox film-making, you never shoot sequentially - but with improv, obviously every move you make has a knock-on effect; it is a cumulative process. I have improvised, on the non-scripted 'Timecode.' It can become entirely indulgent: actors smashing crockery and competing verbally.

Every time a confident, successful woman like Marissa Meyer distances herself from feminism, I think of Athena. Athena women, with all their brilliance and strategy, are the ones smashing up through layers of glass. They tend to identify with men, keeping femininity at a distance.

If I liken the Pacific War to a football match, I can say to you that the first half is over, we have kicked off after the interval, and we are going to carry the ball into enemy territory for a smashing victory.

I learned how to play guitar by playing along to Jane's Addiction records and Smashing Pumpkins records, things you can totally hear if you listen to my guitar.