What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

I'm all for a quiet life. I just didn't get one.

True friends. Hardest thing to find, but you never look for them - they found you ; you just grow into each other

Music works in mysterious ways. Once it goes in you have no idea what it can do to you.

Music is a necessity. After food, air, water and warmth, music is the next necessity of life.

There was a knock on our dressing-room door. Our manager shouted, 'Keith! Ron! The Police are here!' Oh, man, we panicked, flushed everything down the john. Then the door opened and it was Stewart Copeland and Sting.

One minute I'm standing at Ronnie Scott's getting a standing ovation and the next minute, I'm on a marble slab