“It wasn’t directed at him in the sense that I wrote it just to finally admit how I felt. It was written almost irrespective of the person and irrespective of their response to it. It wasn’t written to elicit a response from this person or to seek any form of revenge. It was to unburden myself.”Alanis Morissette (1)

“[Does she think he knows it is about him? – Ed] He’s probably very much wondering. But I wrote it for the sake of my own release. If I was writing it to get revenge I’d be plastering his picture everywhere and saying his name to everyone, but I’m not and I won’t. It was written for myself. I’m secretly grateful to him for ending the relationship. It had felt so excruciatingly painful it forced me to realise I had continually put my self-esteem in a man’s hands. Through that I learned that I would never do that again.”Alanis Morissette (432)

“I wrote that at a time when I was willing to admit that in a lot of the other songs I may have felt like a victim of sorts. But in this song I take responsibility, which was a foreshadowing of things to come in the future. Just seeing that a lot of times I was my own saboteur. So that song is such a sweet, warm song. It’s about the fear of health. About being with someone who would, heaven forbid, treat me kindly.”Alanis Morissette (2)

“I was on antibiotics and I was jittery all day and freaking out. An hour before writing I was saying I had to get off these, so it was such a natural thing to sing. The song is my thanking the experience of having gone to India, and the space that I entered into and emerged from surrounding the time of having gone on that trip.”Alanis Morissette (3)

“A whole lot of the environments I had been in over the years, not just in India or in Asia but in LA for that matter, had a foundation that was supposedly compassion and kindness and non-judgement, and I found the opposite to be true. And it was really sad and wonderfully disillusioning. So it was kind of affirming that we don’t find this bliss and this sense of our higher selves outside of ourselves, it’s something that we already are.”Alanis Morissette (4)

“I was under a lot of pressure, just time-wise if nothing else, to hurry up and finish the record. I was buckling a little bit so I left the studio, went home (but I had roommates staying) so I locked myself in the closet and sat there and wrote everything that I felt. And those were the lyrics for “That I Would Be Good”.”Alanis Morissette (5)

“This is a song about who and what I thought God is. I was in Dublin and had seen a rough cut of “Dogma”.”Alanis Morissette (5)

“I was being asked just with my own self if I was actually going to call someone and give them a reason to not want to end this existence, what would I possibly say to them? And that is what this song became. The person I wrote it for cried when he heard it.”Alanis Morissette (5)