I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give most willingly

I'm not in the habit of having my photo snapped on some pretty young thing's arm. I avoid pictures because they serve no purpose, except to point out each new line, which is very meaningless.

I'm not really hip to too much of the Zen or the Buddhist point of view, but you see I don't have to be because I just know that they're all the same, it's all the same, it's just whichever one you want to take and it happens that I'm taking the Hindu one.

We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool. We didn't actually try it until after we'd been to Hamburg. I remember we smoked it in the band room in a gig in Southport and we all learnt to do the Twist that night, which was popular at the time. We were all seeing if we could do it. Everybody was saying, 'This stuff isn't doing anything.' It was like that old joke where a party is going on and two hippies are up floating on the ceiling, and one is saying to the other, 'This stuff doesn't work, man.'

I want to be successful, not famous.

Been stuck in airports, terrorized; sent to meetings, hypnotized; overexposed, commercialized. Handle me with care.

No-one knows what I do in my private, spare time, so I don't see why anyone would assume I'm celibate or somehow turning into a Garboesque character.