I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.

It's nice to be able to backtrack and not be embarrassed by the music you used to listen to.

I gathered all the different Peel Sessions recordings together - I did six or seven of them over the years - and listened to all of them. These definitely have at least a superficial relationship to each other because they're all very spare.

There's very little admirable about being a pirate. There's very little functional about a pirate. There's very little real about a pirate.

The songs are not meant to be real life. They're meant to have a psychic - rather than a factual - bearing on the listener. It's rare that a song grounded in reality moves me because I don't feel like I'm getting the whole story. Songs are made to exist in and of themselves, like a great James Jones or Robert Louis Stevenson novel - they're not autobiographical, and yet there's a reality in every single page. It's real life of the imagination.

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

The first music I bought when I was nine or 10 was pop music from the '50s and '60s, like The Everly Bros., Elvis, Del Shannon, The Flamingos, The Platters, whatever I could get my hands on. And then some musical things, like Camelot, Singing in the Rain and Hair.