I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.

The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.

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

I'll probably lose every friend I've got, but I think the Russians are about the only people who have behaved decently in the conflict with the Ukraine. All the evidence to the contrary seems a bit bogus to me. NATO is trying to use Ukraine to isolate and cripple Russia, and that's completely crazy and very cruel. It seems to me that our side, the English and American people, really want it to go bad there. But there's no need for it to have done so. At least that's what I think. You won't hear a lot of that on Fox News.

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.

It's funny that Chairman Mao's great hero was Napoleon, because Napoleon started out as a revolutionary for the underdogs and then made himself an emperor. In fact, a lot of revolutionary leaders do that, and you think, "Well, that's spoiling your argument. What are you doing?" But on the other hand, the people themselves are enjoying trying out all these different ways to be. I hope that, like the Japanese, the Chinese hang on to their own traditions as well as try out Western ones. I hate it when people just lose so much confidence in who they are that they abandon their own culture.

Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.