[Jazz musicians] couldn't cut rock. I had to be more limited and specific about what I was doing.

I like [George] Benson because I just like it. I like that kind of style. I don't like the broken up kind of style. I don't like where you play for 16 bars and then break it up into what somebody's version of what birds twittering sounds like, or what the sound of the city is, or what New York sounds like.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

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.

A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images.