There is a magic in some books / That sucks a man into connections / With the spirits hard to touch / That join him to his kind.

When you've done something, certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else.

I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death.

There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.

You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have feelings, and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else.

The United States has held out against taking part in any of the world consensus that there should be a court of human rights or that there should be an international court of criminal justice.

I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the war.