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

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.

There's not much point in getting any heavier... there's too many things to read and look at.

You go through stages where you wonder whether you are Christ, or just looking for him.

Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we'd better do something postmodernist - quickly, before somebody else did.

Love is every type of relationship that you think of... I'm sure it means relationship, every type of relationship that you can think of.

Having not really written any generational songs - I think maybe two or three of the songs that I've ever written have any bearing on the age of the listener. My stuff tends to be far more concerned with the spiritual and with subjects like isolation and being miserable.