Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

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

People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy."

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

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

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.

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