Potentially, America is really the greatest, but it's not yet, I don't think. It's too much like an old-fashioned empire, waving the stick and dropping too many bombs on too many people.

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.

There's no point having wishes if you don't at least try to do them

...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.

Orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

Prayer is not a check request asking for things from God. It is a deposit slip - a way of depositing God's character into our bankrupt souls.

If you decide to live a pure life, don't expect the world to understand your decision.

These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism.

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.

I like anything that's edible.

Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

The skilful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles.