My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.

Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.

I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.

I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.

I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.

I don't know how many thoughts we have a second, but it's quite an amazing number, and just to pin down the appropriate sequence of those, all you really need is a pencil and a piece of paper.

I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.

There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

You were born rich and influential. You can do rich and influential in jammies and bunny slippers.

A praiseworthy King is he who doesn't seek the most expensive throne, rather the most effective leadership style.

Damon Runyon. A day-coach boy in a parlor car seat.

I was elected to the Diet in the same way as at every parliamentary election.

Playing the game was the easy part. The real work was in the preparation.

I'm not extra sensitive to handshakes. I shake hands all the time.

The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

Love is touching souls.

If principles can become dated, they're not principles.

Living from the perspective at which you came from and returning to source really is an act of remembering, rather than an act of learning.