In fact, when the fires of empire get hidden, they still stay burning underneath the moss, seething away. This is true with a lot of the countries with really difficult, impenetrable nationalist movements - countries that once had a big empire, like Turkey, England, or even in Italy, with the fascists in the middle of the last century. People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.

I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.