The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.