There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.

The Gay News critic wrote that I 'carried the lilt of the Irish without the brogue'.

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

If there is a sort of national American emotion I would call it optimism. If there is an English one I would call it embarrassment - not even pessimism - just sheer shame, embarrassment and confusion.

Money no longer has any meaning. Civilization is coming to an end. If not the destruction of the world, it's an endless stalemate.