What it comes down to for me is this: Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?

I don't feel as if I'm in competition with myself; not at all.

Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.

You take the risk of being rejected. If you have pretentions to be an artist of any kind, you have to take the risk of people rejecting you and thinking you're an arsehole.

People are encouraged by what I do. You can feel it. I feel it. People are ready to embrace their humanity and to embrace the rest of the human race. People are ready for the idea that we're all brothers and sisters and that we need to cooperate with one another.

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.

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