“It’s always music first, or melody and words together, but never words first.”

Eventually, they’ll just go away, because you will make them sad. That’s something I’ve proven quite adept at doing over the years.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn’t mean you’re fantastic.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.

For all the things I’m losing I might aswell resign myself to try and make a change.

Closeness to other people is really hard, but it’s also a shame because it’s all you want too. But it doesn’t always work.

I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can’t see how to do it.

If you want to really love someone, you’ve got to let go and loosen up and just care.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it’s such a common, constant thing in people’s lives – a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it’s just accepted.

You have a career, the reason why we’re still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

When you’re young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There’s a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.

I’ve been playing music most of my life.

Got no place to go, but there’s a girl waitin’ for me down in Mexico. She got a bottle of tequila, a bottle of gin, and if I bring a little music, I could fit right in.

Time and time again I can’t please myself.

There’s people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.

The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.

First of all, Vince McMahon doesn’t argue – he tells you!

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.

I got my first job the old-fashioned way.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

First of all, it has gone past God and past Christ right through to me. If it has come that far.