The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

People's musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

I want to make music that will make the blood surge in your veins, music that will get people up and dance.

Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.

I'd rather eat a cow-pat on a bun than a bloody McDonalds.

It doesn't matter how adventurous you want to be, you've still got to contain your identity.

Being in a band didn't buy me my beans on toast!

Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.

Men behave very oddly in the company of attractive women.

Arty. To me the word's got as much venom associated with it as 'wacky'.

Practice what you preach and let people learn from you

What we do to others, we do to ourselves.

In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.

After an All-Blacks surprise loss to the French in the 1999 Rugby World Cup: “The French are predictably unpredictable.

Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.

I was born into public service.

China is in its own category - too big to ignore, too repressive to embrace, difficult to influence, and very, very proud.

If all men were rich, all men would be poor.

You need not know what you are. Enough to know what you are not. What you are you will never know, for every discovery reveals new dimensions to conquer. The unknown has no limits.

If you love somebody, set them free.