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.

I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic.

Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.

I think it's hypocritical to complain about the rise of China. For 50 years, we were telling everybody in the world that the big threat was Communism, so now the countries that were Communists are now rampant capitalists - and they're doing very well, in some ways much better than the UK. Well, we asked for it. We told them that's what you have to do, and they're doing it, buying up your biggest hotels in New York. You have to laugh.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.