I figure it's okay to make certain rules, whether or not people despise you for it at the time.

Frank Sinatra's never been handsome, but he's one of my favorite singers. Who needs looks when you have a voice and power?

All you do is you go back to the Maida Vale Studios at BBC in London, and it feels like you're in a spaceship. It feels like you're in 2001 or something like that. It's massive and well constructed and highly technologically advanced and occupied by these wise scientists, engineers, and producers. Listening to it, it just doesn't sound like me - that's a younger self that didn't know who he was or what he was doing. I can't identify with a nebulous cloud.

I was worried before I saw the play 'The Seven Storey Mountain', thinking I don't really want to see a play about Thomas Merton. He probably wouldn't have either, ideally. Then it isn't. It's more about us and it's about our relationship to what he may or may not have thought about. It's its own thing completely.

Writing songs is a profession; so it's not an attempt to take things from my interactions with other people and for some reason give them to a total stranger to listen to. I find it offensive to hear other people do that.

You make the world - with enough strength and enough luck you make the world that you live in. If you accept that there's participation to be done and an existence to be had - I tend to think there is only one way I want to go through this existence and that's with my eyes open and my chest out.

I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.