I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.

I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians.

When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.