The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.

I don't like people probing into my life, so I reveal as little as possible or lie about it as much as need be so as to give them something to write about.

I always write well in New York.

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.

People are always throwing things at me that I've said and I say that I didn't mean anything.

My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class.