“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Democracy is for infidels. A real Muslim is not a democrat because he doesn’t care about the opinions of majorities and minorities don’t interest him. He is only interested in what Islam says.

A majority of women seem to consider themselves sent into the world for the sole purpose of displaying dry goods, and it is only when acting the part of an animated milliner’s block that they feel they are performing their appropriate mission.

The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

Well, I have one consolation. No candidate was ever elected ex-president by such a large majority!

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.