“I’m not religious, but I’m very spiritual.”

Sometimes you write a song in a certain era and it’s got a certain kind of significance.

To get a big hit single you’ve got to go a bit dance. You’ve got to go a bit Britney. I don’t think I can do that – well, I could but it wouldn’t look very seemly!.

Painting is similar to music. You get a couple or words or notes or chords that excite you, and you just follow them and add a bit more and see where it takes you. That’s the thrill for me. It still is a thrill, which is amazing after all this time.

Transcendental Meditation gives me an island of calm in the midst of so much turbulence.

Sadness isn’t sadness. It’s happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They’re balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It’s life that’s jumped off a tall cliff.

You can judge a man’s true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.

None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back.

I realized marvelling at nature was a deep pleasure of mine.

The thing you must remember is that I’m the Number One John Lennon fan. I love him to this day and I always did love him

So, if I’m cooking, I’ll be steaming vegetables, making some nice salad, that kind of stuff.

Look, people are allowed their own opinions and they don’t always coincide with yours. As an artist you just have to keep plugging on.

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better. It’s a little better all the time.

There are only four people who knew what the Beatles were about anyway.

It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ I thought, this is it.

Having a beard is natural. When you think about it, shaving it off is quite weird.

You see, my mother was a district nurse until she died when I was 14, and we used to move from time to time because of her work.

The Jihad is not just a way of testing yourself but also means using violence to spread Islam.

I didn’t have a very religious family.

Almost all countries have natural dividing lines, and when ethnic and religious partition occurs in one country, it’ll soon happen elsewhere.

Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.

It’s not religious war, but Al-Qaeda always use religions, Islam – actually, as a pretext and as a cover and as a mantle for their war and for their terrorism and for their killing and beheading and so on.

I think one of the great strengths of Americans United is that it has such diversity.

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.