Memories, how they linger in the twilight and in the wee small hours sometimes just before dawn.

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

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.

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

My responsibility is to fulfil what that natural thing is. The thing that I dislike about pop rock Top 40 music is that it's not natural.

You are who you are. It doesn't make any point to go out and buy the Top 40 albums to see what those acts are doing. There's no point in hearing what's going on. The only thing that's going on is what's been going forever. It's just that some people dig that bag and some people dig the other bag.

Sartre said that hell is other people, I believe that most of them are