You want to sing this song. And so it goes on until eventually, after - well, however long it can take - sometimes a few days, sometimes months - you piece the whole thing together.

Be a military flier or be in a band; those were the two hippest things I could imagine.

Later in life, suddenly, if you're an outsider, it's something to be celebrated, I think, rather than getting on people's nerves.

You try to make every word count, so there's no doubt what you're talking about. When you're young, you waffle away. Well, I'm done with that. I think it's much more interesting to say just what you mean.

These days, rock 'n' roll is much more about rock than about roll. I don't do rock. But I'm interested in that roll part, because that's the funny little bit that makes it hip.

I felt that in order to do what I wanted to do, I had to do certain things, and one of them was to have a hit in my own right. At least one.

When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, "God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap.