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.

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 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?

When what you hear and what you see don't match, trust your eyes.

Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.

There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don't get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly.

Everyone loves a conspiracy.

It's almost as if our society values opinion over knowledge.

As all of us with any involvement in sports knows, no two umpires or no two referees have the same strike zone or call the same kind of a basketball game

The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.

Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people.

For most people who write, writing is a compulsion. If I could be healed of it, I would, and I think a lot of people who write feel the same way.

I will spend my heaven doing good on earth.