“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Every time I release an album my old record company releases another one.

I picked and co-wrote the songs that if I was a guy who would be spending my hard-earned money buying an album I would want to hear.

You’re always frustrated, you don’t have the chance to do a song on the album, like the Beatles did with Ringo and George, or like Led Zeppelin, where everybody was given a chance to contribute. There never is a chance with the Stones.

I tried acting and all of the arts, I even put out a record album, but what I like the most is business.

I’m narrating the television series Biography. I’m still involved in my music – I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I’m writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.

I’d done three solo albums in a row, and that’s quite narcissistic.

I never liked making albums.

Someone told me once that Lucinda Williams takes six years between albums, and that’s what stuck to me; it’s like, you really are a factory. You don’t do things to make them, on your own time.