My idea of a good night out is staying in.

Being a mod is more of a sensibility than a style.

You could say I'm a mod, but with a small 'm'; I don't wear a parka, but I do question what I wear and what I listen to, which is what it's all about.

Name anything - high-definition TV, computer obsolescence - and I'm pretty much annoyed by it.

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

I've got a stag weekend coming up and I've said I'm not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won't have it. I'll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

True heroics, obviously, is not the absence of fear, but having that fear and doing something anyway.

Sherlock and Watson are a love story

If rocks did not persevere under heat and pressure, they would never become diamonds.

Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

Our country has tremendous problems. We're a debtor nation.

I don't think that success is the premise to what is good or bad.

Charity alone, or love and compassion, is what joins [the Lord and a person] together.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.

Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate; it doesn't reflect my life experience.