I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.

I can never make up my mind if I'm happy being a flute player, or if I wish I were Eric Clapton.

Why do the faithful have such a will, to believe in something? And call in the name they choose, having chosen nothing.

When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.

It was instilled in me that the money I was given was not to be lost or spent on any other purpose.

Touring is what you make it. I like to organise as much as possible myself.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.