You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.

Ring the bells that still can ring.

It's inappropriate for an elderly chap to register, you know, authentically, his feelings, you know, because they really can be interpreted. So you have to get quite covert as you get older. Or you have to find some avuncular way, you know, of responding.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca.

I'm never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.

As soon as anybody does one of my songs, I rejoice. This particular case of all these great singers doing my work - the implications are very rich and the temptation to think of the outcome of these masses of the mainstream injecting my work into the marketplace, it's a very sweet speculation.

I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.