“Like with New Bums and Donovan Quinn, he is seriously one of the greatest songwriters in terms of words that is alive right now. So I really wanted to play with him to experience that, to play music with these really great words.”

Probably the art, in that a lot of the people who I want to collaborate with can do something that I can’t do.

For me Henry Corbin, the way that he writes about certain esoteric matters, is in a phenomenological way that refuses a New Age lens. But at the same time he’s very much responsible for a lot of New Age thought, because he was a very syncretic thinker.

All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.

Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us in different directions.

When lying, be emphatic and indignant, thus behaving like your children.

Karl Malone’s too high-class for a bum like me.

I’d sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.

One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.

I personally prefer freedom of thought. But in England you get neither: you’re ground down by convention. You can’t think as you like and you can’t act as you like. That’s because it’s a democratic nation. I expect America’s worse.