There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.

I stopped drinking a few years ago, and 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. You can get away with that your 20s, but not in your 60s, and I'll be 70 next year. Life is a small space now, much more intimate. I'm not out there in the world anymore, but I'm watching.

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.

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.

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 really liked them, not just Syd, but all of them. Roger was very important, I thought, his contribution. And so was Rick's organ playing. It was a good band. It became something else completely, obviously.

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