If you look around, complacency is the great disease of your autumn years, and I work hard to prevent that.

Rock music is the province of the young, and it should be made by young people. I'm not running around in a pair of spandex tights trying to reclaim my youth.

I've had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn't really require you to sit down and work out what the story's about. You're brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it's kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It's taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.

I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I'm concerned I'm actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I'm a man.

There's always pain around. That's one thing you can guarantee in life - there will always be a surplus of pain.

And she moves among the sparrows. And she floats upon the breeze. She moves among the flowers. She moves something deep inside of me

The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.