I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Being a mod is more of a sensibility than a style.

You could say I'm a mod, but with a small 'm'; I don't wear a parka, but I do question what I wear and what I listen to, which is what it's all about.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

I've got a stag weekend coming up and I've said I'm not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won't have it. I'll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

True heroics, obviously, is not the absence of fear, but having that fear and doing something anyway.

Sherlock and Watson are a love story

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

I despaired at the thought that my life might slip by without seeing God show himself mightily on our behalf.

People are always trading their excess for somebody else's excess. One country has a lot of aluminum so they trade aluminum for sugar. It's the law of supply and demand.

So I place my heart under lock and key, to take some time to look after me. But when I turn around you're standing there.

Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write.

I invented nothing new, I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom there was centuries of work.

Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.

Demos are something you do in the early stages of your career, but when you get going, you just go in and record the song.

If I have a monument in this world, it is my son.

Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.

I write most of my songs when I'm in a bad mood.