If you're a guitarist, you should not be intimidated by using your instrument as a synthesizer, but you shouldn't feel that you have to own one, either.

There is always the working out of things, and you have to have sort of a gut response to it. And an intellectual response. And an aesthetic response. All that comes from having done this for a long time. Instead of saying, "That's a really good rock track, and that will do," I'm looking for something that is more original and fresh. There are a lot of elements to get into it: a level or sophistication, passion and excitement.

Actually, I think my hands are in the best shape they've ever been in terms of what I can do.

In The Police, in a trio situation - which I've come back to now - it's just so wide open that it does actually provide this arena where you can play with a certain freedom.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.