The pleasure of other people is a byproduct of the pleasure that comes from yourself so I cannot judge or look down on someone who does whatever they feel like doing.

I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.

It's like soul music, isn't it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.

I really love that type of music where someone can take a guitar or light instrumentation and a beautiful voice and can send me somewhere.

Anything lower than mid-six figures is not going to get me interested in that. And honestly, I just don't want to.

If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick.

I've never presented myself as anything less than a flawed person.

When you get a chance to play with people - informally is one thing, but when you hook up and make something that's going to last or mean something to someone, I take it very seriously.

I'm a very private person. What I did in the past or what somebody heard me do or has a bootleg of me doing...well, if you have a bootleg, then I did it.

I think you can find yourself in life perhaps not really being the master of your own life and it is within your own will and tenacity whether you switch the roles or not.

You make music to move people and you don't get to pick who you move. You just don't. It's exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.

The corsets I wore in The Railway Children are still in my undies drawer, a prized relic of my favourite film

I am working for the victims of Africa, they are African like me. That's where I get my inspiration and my pride.

Envy is more incapable of reconciliation than hatred is.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.

Marriage is like a chess match is initiated and the board expands over time until it takes up all of a life.

In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.

There is another form of poverty! It is the spiritual poverty of our time, which afflicts the so-called richer countries particularly seriously.

I don't want to have children...I want to date them!

If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.