I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it.

I get myself a gig somewhere, whether it's in a club, whether it's in a bar, it doesn't matter, and I just work on New Year's Eve because I always feel it's very symbolic for me for the next year, for the new year.

I've had some lovely extraordinary experiences on New Year's Eve.

If you were a painter and a rock and roll musi­cian and weren't established in either - to be an artist today you have to be as much a businessman to suc­ceed, you have to spend an equal amount of time doing business as you spend doing your craft.

That undercurrent of the forbidden was always a part of rock.

There are all these different areas of specialization. That's it. You have to be a specialist nowadays. There's no other way. I was an artist for a long time, but I was always into being a general practitioner. I did a little of this and a little of that. And nothing got me anywhere. You have to specialize. If you don't specialize, it takes you until you're about fifty years old before anybody notices that you're doing anything at all.

We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.