“We are not actually in charge of life, yet we behave as if we are the masters of our own destiny. The realization of this fact is quite a hard one. The ridiculousness of our pomposity and presumption can only result in anger or humor.”

We tend to take a great deal for granted, because you feel like you’re going to live forever. It’s only if you lose a friend, or maybe have a near-death experience, [that] many events and people in your life suddenly attain real significance.

One of my biggest problems in life has been my inability to lie.

I gave up drinking lots of whiskey and began to practice yoga and meditation. As a result I am not dead.

I’ve always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the ’80s it was a surprise to me.

When I was better known than her, she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother, but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because ‘you aren’t going to make a living doing that.’ I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh.

Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don’t like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen.

I’m going to get a pair of wire-snips, and I’ve also started a new campaign to have blank CDs on jukeboxes so you can play the silence.

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh’s life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.

Failure is fantastic, because you meet yourself and get to know your limitations. This is how I express myself, and I can’t do it any other way.

The most challenging work I’ve seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, ‘A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards’, is apt in these days of witless chancers.

I did not like prizes at school. I didn’t like tests or exams, or the 11+, or O-levels. Later I hated B.A.s and M.A.s. The reason I hated them is that I don’t like being tested, failed or falsely praised by anyone.

It is an artist’s duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.

I’ve not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I’ll listen to ‘Spiral Scratch’ by the Buzzcocks, or ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

We had the same kind of unemployment here as they had in the worst hit places in the North and you’re meant to be on a cushy wicket in the South.

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American

Conventional money is supposed to be doing everything. By adding in complementary currencies, you actually get different types of things and different outcomes from different complementary currencies.

I actually went to university.

I spent so much time focusing on haters that I forgot about the people that actually love me. And that’s who I’m focused on this time around: the people that want to listen. The people that don’t want to listen, don’t listen. This is for the people that want to.

This transcends any kind of religion and any kind of belief. This is actually an offense and attack on human values. He’s just saying out there I will shoot people in the face and people wouldn’t care.

Do not miss the opportunity of offering even a single drop into the ocean of merit or a grain atop the mountain of the roots of beneficial activity.

Official truth is not actual truth.

I must be very close to what I had to learn to move from fooling around with writing to actually producing professional stories.