“I like to work quickly; I never like to waste any time. I never write half a song and come back to it later at all. It all has to be done at once. I lose interest if it doesn’t.”

I am a simple vessel with complex overtones, opinionated on occasions but willing to listen.

Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.

My Mother set me on the right track, Marty Robbins made me want to write songs, and Jesus Christ did the rest.

Lincolnshire is the Idaho of England. You were either going to drive a tractor for the rest of your life or head for the city to work in a factory.

One reason I quit doing interviews after years and years and years was because I was making things up.

Read books, discover the blues and don’t Tweet.

Captain Fantastic’ was the first album in history to enter the (American) album chart at number one. We did it for a second time after that. Now that’s not a boast, that’s frightening.

My favorite thing is coming up with titles. The majority of the songs I’ve every written I’ve always thought of the title before I’ve written the song.

My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.

Elton John’s home is laden with trinkets and books relating to Satanism and witchcraft.

The worst thing about me is that I’ll buy albums and put them away on the shelf and forget that I’ve got them.

Basically it takes me very little time to write a song. If I find myself taking more than an hour to do it I usually forget it, and try something else.

For me, being onstage for an hour and a half, my confidence was really huge for me. Doing eight shows a week for a run.

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.

My dad told me, ‘It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success’, and it took me seventeen and a half years.

The energy of live theater is indescribable. You are just in the moment for an hour and a half.

And when the other half get the idea it does no good to work because somebody’s going to get what I work for. That, dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them.

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.