I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.

After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love.

...a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

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.

At the very center of our culture is a crucified man, a tortured man hanging on a cross of wood. You have an image of violence at the very center of our spiritual investigation.