‎Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.

I write, as far as I can tell, because writing is a black sheep sibling of prayer, an urgent struggle against a bad connection, intent, hopeful, innocent, never quite good enough.

In the '80s, everyone wanted to be in opera. It was groovy.

I believe in disrupting my comfort zone.

The whole creative process...is putting opposites together into something that wasn't there before.

We have to create security for the working families of Britain, and that's what I'll do

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

It is extremely important to know what you don't want to find.

You do not reach the sublime by degrees; the distance between it and the merely beautiful is infinite.

It's very rare that I play cool people. I'm not sure what that says about me.

If there are only you and the music in the room, it means that there are two persons in the room! Music is a live being!