Cram as much pleasure as you can into life, and rail against the pain that you have to suffer as a result.

I drink because I'm thirsty.

I've been a babe magnet for quite a while now.

You can’t hate people unless you love them.

Everyone drinks..........Well, unless they don't.

There is drinking in lots of the songs because there is drinking in life. Drinking stimulates the imagination.

When I'm writing a song, it gives me more actual pleasure to hear someone else sing it than do it meself.

I'm not so much a rock star, d'ya know what I mean? I play Irish music. There's really no age when you stop playing Irish music. Even if I retired from playing onstage, I'd still be singing in pubs.

I don't believe in the Holy Trinity - but I do believe in the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spook is just a friendly way of saying Holy Ghost.

There's an art to playing live. It's a great feeling. It's indescribable. It's what I love. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it.

I play Irish popular music, yeah? Calling it folk is like putting it in a box. It's a living tradition, you know?

Sometimes it's not always straightforward, but it's not always confusing either. You just have to respect a person's decisions without disrespecting them.

The greatest obstacle to liberty is not the existence of evil rulers, but the belief in the existence of good rulers.

Morning brings refreshing thoughts.The first thought in the morning, 'Thank God' for the gift of a new day and wonders.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

I'm not saying it's safe to go sit out in the sun all day but I don't believe that sun is bad for you.

It's not so much wanting to die, but controlling that moment, choosing your own way.

We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.

What do I feel when I shoot an enemy? Recoil.