Drugs will get you out of your own way, but we lived it, and that's dangerous. It can actually turn around on itself and steal your soul, and that's what happened.

The band's never taken a year off. Last August we decided to take one, and three months in I was bored to tears.

People used to ask me, 'What do you reckon you'll be doing when you're 40?', and I told 'em 'rocking out and kicking ass!' Now it's 'What do you reckon you'll be doing at 60?' and the answer's exactly the same. I'm always going to love Jimi Hendrix - 'Purple Haze' will still give me a hard-on when I'm hooked up to a life-support machine. Hey, even when I'm dead, they're going to have a hell of a job nailing the coffin lid down.

We believed anything worth doing was worth over-doing

In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common.

Humility is really important because it keeps you fresh and new.

If they [Guns N' Roses] didn't get back together soon they would have missed their window and no one would have cared in 3 or 4 years.