The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.