Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

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

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 would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar

If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.

When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.

I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.