If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.

I really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously.

I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.

I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.

I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal.

In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

It just doesn't mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.

I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.

I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.