We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

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 want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. Its the most radical thing.

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.

All these years I've sat in airports and kind of drawn people and put like Far Side captions on them.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we lov'd?

Maybe she'd always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them.

I set another goal, a reasonable, manageable goal that I could realistically achieve if I worked hard enough. I approached everything step by step.

I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.

No compassion will be tolerated for the Jews. We deny the Pope’s statement that there is but one human race. The Jews are parasites.

I've had a lot of struggles and I would be in a lot of trouble, I think, if I wasn't a Christian.