It’s perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London?

I've dated attractive people and I don't find a correlation between amorous enthusiasm and beauty and public figure status.

For me to speak out against the war in Iraq, you know - most of my fans are lefties anyway, so I don't really get much flack for it.

When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

The world is experiencing great change, but you've got loads of people terrified of this change and the Donald Trumps, the Boris Johnsons making utterly simplistic, reductionist policy proposals that are unrealistic but then people buy it up.

If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.