“So when I got to 50 I just thought, Hold on: I’m thin. I’ve got my hair. I’m well off. I survived, you know”

Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we’d have done it. That’s the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, ‘were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?’

I’m a big believer in that old cliché of thinking globally and acting locally.

Most people get into bands for three very simple rock and roll reasons: to get laid, to get fame, and to get rich.

90% of the divorces are initiated by women. That is really odd. Why? What’s going on? What’s the great discontent at the heart of it?

It’s like you asked me about the depression thing: you grope towards an understanding of whatever it is your going through, and it’s not personal, there are forces in play around you, and you seek to understand them and that way you can go on

Our problem is that everybody tries to heal each of the individual aspects of poverty, not poverty itself.

Music can’t change the world.

We’re looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition… doesn’t matter if it’s death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty.

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce, men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure.

They thought they were Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. In fact, they were more like Tom and Jerry

But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.

It’s really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you’re going to get it to these people.

Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it.

I don’t think anyone sets out to malign poor people but certainly that’s what we do through organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

I’m sure I’m very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality.

When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks.

I did not have a script [of Close Up]. I made notes in the evenings and we filmed during the day over 40 days.I didn’t sleep a wink for those 40 nights.

I have a picture from the end of the shoot, and in it I have lost all my hair.

I never wore a single fedora filming L.A. Noire. It took about an hour and a half to do the hair – it was a very precise process.

Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think – no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There’s an inherent irony.

The story was a sleeping girl in a narrow bed Dark hair thick and wild and twisted like seaweed across the pillow.

There is snow on my face and wind in my hair and winter has nearly stolen me. But as I remember the words of our song then spring still owns a part of me.

I do not think I reinvent myself. Wearing my hair differently or changing my style of dress is playing dress-up. I don’t take it too seriously.

Even when I get the fried-chicken special of the day, I have to dig into it like it’s filet mignon.