The minute you finish a piece of writing it doesn't belong to you, you don't write it any more, it belongs to you, the reader, the listener, the audience. So the less you know about whether or not this is me talking about my life or this is me talking about your life, I think the better. Then it can belong to you and it can live outside of the moment in which it was conceived.

If you ever feel comfortable in what you're producing, you've lost. You're not alive, that's it, it's stagnant water.

Your job is to facilitate and improve your capacity so that when an idea comes you can facilitate it. That's your job as a human being, in my opinion anyway.

Actually in the moment in which the idea has life, when it's listened to read, engaged with, acted on stage, it gains another dimension, it becomes three dimensional.

Allow yourself to be out of your depth at all times.

In London, the most, the biggest thing we have is culture, you know what I mean? That's what we've done for the past 50, 60 100 years, this is what we've done. My worry is that that will change but actually, that will never change because musicians will just go somewhere else.

The more you close the doors, the less free your ideas can come, and they come from up here and come through you.