What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.

You know, albums are a funny thing. They're not like an intellectual decision. It's a collection of your kind of musings. Like it's a collection of your diary entries and you pick which one's gonna make the most sense together and you put out a record and you sort of live it.

In Irish law, busking is considered vagrancy - you can be arrested for it. It's risky asking people for money in public. So it's not like it's a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money.

You know, albums are a funny thing. They're not like an intellectual decision. It's a collection of your kind of musings.

I choose to believe that there is good in people and that everything is a lesson. Our place on Earth is to go deeper, to somehow get wiser. To have spirit.

If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.

I've always felt that if I ever got cynical, I would have to stop making music because I'd just be poisoning the air.