Quotes
It doesn't really matter what era I'm in. Because I haven't ever really felt quite in an era, I don't feel out of one.
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.
In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.
If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.
I've reduced the amount I do, rather than increase it.
I've never been any kind of patriot, including not a cultural patriot. So I have no problem with new immigrants bringing new ideas. I'm happy about that.
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.
I'm terminally kind of sad, but I'm also fed up with... very often, younger acts, particularly, sing with angst and sort of work themselves up into a psychosis of bitterness and anxiety. It's a well-known phenomena.
I'm still trying to do the same thing, only get it right!
I'm recording at Phil Manzanera's studio. A really nice bloke. We have mutual friends like Bill McCormick and Brian Eno.
I'm quite limited in what I can do, so sometimes I just have to say no, not because I don't like it, but because I just don't think I can do justice to the idea of the song.
I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.
I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.
I'm grateful that people one-half or one-third my age are listening because if you look at magazines, you get the impression that people are locked into their own age groups.
I'd say that when I feel I've done my thing right, it's been my own material. When I did a bunch of singles later on which went onto a compilation, there was a track there called Born Again Cretin, which musically was in my own words.
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.
I was very pleased that the Italian government has refused recent pressure from Germany and Austria to stop admitting refugee Kurds. I don't think the previous Christian Democrat government would have any qualms about sending them back to hell.
I was very influenced by painters and artists, more than musicians, when I was a teenager.
I was in the U.S. in 1968, and there were several assassinations of major figures, and there was a war going on, and certainly there was a feeling that everything in culture resonated politically in some way. Black music from the jazz side played an important part in that.