Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.

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.

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.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.