When we decided to marry, we had two ceremonies - one was more bureaucratic for the sake of the Swiss authorities,then a church service in Florence, and I wrote the music for the church service. The challenge in that was that Iman's [Abdulmajid] family are Muslim and mine are Protestant. I had to be careful about the prayers that we chose and the music I wrote because I didn't want to offend either side.

I'd rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.

Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

Every time I've made a radical change it's helped me feel buoyant as an artist

People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, "This guy's hot you should buy this record."