When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.

I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.

I didn't know what some of the stuff on Astral Weeks was about until years later.

Let me purify my thoughts and words and deeds that I may be a vehicle for thee.

Performing was the natural thing originally and the rest of it [records and so on] is just like offshoots of that. That's how I see it anyway.

I was like one of those newspapers, those periodicals. There's all different kinds of alcoholics. There's the everyday kind: that's the consistent one. That's what people think an alcoholic is-but an alcoholic is basically just someone who's allergic to alcohol. That's all it means. It's just an allergy.

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.