Subconsciously you just pick up things into your sort of musical vocabulary and use them.

It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.

Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

Little ideas can pop into one's head at any time, and if I'm being reasonably efficient I've got it close enough to hand, then I pop that little tiny moment of a few seconds down onto a tape and then I can forget about it for... years sometimes.

It's not true that you fall in love only once in your life. But it is true that you only fall in love a certain way, with a certain absoluteness, once.

The future is deterministic in principle, but not in practice.

I can remember a lot of nights performing in those early years where you felt that you hit some good moments, but a lot of the time you're thinking, "Oh, God, this isn't quite making it." So I think that is what makes you in the end refine your view of things a little bit.