Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

I've always worn suits. To me they're a very practical kind of thing to wear. You put one on and don't really have to think about what you're going to wear.

There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.

The band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn't, it dies. It's important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.

You don't meet a lot of people that you really like. I don't anyway.