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

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

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'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.

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.

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

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

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

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.

The most intriguing people you will encounter in this life are the people who had insights about you, that you didn't know about yourself.

Let our road be long, let it be very long, let it be very very long and in fact let our road be infinite! Travel means flow, flow means life!

Focus and having energy is the most important goal when choosing my activities and how I treat myself.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

When one maintains his proper attitude in life, he does not long after externals.

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

My advice to any young person at the beginning of their career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with their fresh, untrained and unprejudiced mind.

The choices you've made in the past are the direct cause of all your unhappiness today.

Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There's a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just for leaving things as they are, a price for everything.

Last week I did a piece for Style on advice to Laura Bush about how to help her husband. This week it's religion. It just depends on what I find interesting at the moment.