The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.

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.

I like simple food, seasoned with just salt, pepper, oil and vinegar. Complicated food and complicated lives are never good.

There is nothing a pig loves more than a good bath, with a loofah and plenty of soap flakes ... There is something delightfully lovable about a really clean pig, in clean yellow straw.

On second thought, it's a good thing love is blind otherwise it would see too much.

When I was a child . . . Only virtue was prized, virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.

I have been metal all my life, only I did not know about it. The people in this album (Charlemagne) and I, share the same values.

Evil is an extreme manifestation of human unconsciousness.

How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!

The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.

Opinion, and the just maintenance of it, shall never be a crime in my view.

I just never really thought of not being involved, because when I write the songs I take them to a certain place and by that point I kinda know what I want them to sound like.