“One time I completely thought I’d turned into a werewolf and was sure I could see hairs sprouting from my face. At those times I’d suddenly go very quiet and not talk to anyone, stunned from the developments, being a werewolf and all.”

Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.

Even when I haven’t had money, I found money to travel. It’s a luxury that’s a kind of necessity, I think.

I get told I’m a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word “confessional”. I don’t like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don’t want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

When I first started writing, a friend said I should be careful because I’m letting people know how to reach right in and play with my workings. And they do!

The way I write, words can means lots of different things.

At about the age of ten, my friends and I discovered the joys of sitting in graveyards drinking merrydown cider and kissing and stealing our elder siblings’ records.

I love the water more than anything. I’m not very good at sunbathing – I get really bored. I love swimming and I love being like a fish and getting in the sea and just – I don’t know, it feels right.

I’m not comfortable holidaying in other people’s poverty.

My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.

When I’m on a roll nothing makes me happier or feel more satisfied, like plugging in, life makes sense.

Norfolk is not on the way to anywhere, you don’t stop off on the way somewhere else – it’s an end in itself. You have to want to go there; it’s an effort.

I don’t read music; I taught myself guitar.

I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.

We’re all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn’t it?

I was scared of the Bible – it seemed whenever I read it I got bad luck. Then I befriended a couple of Jesus’s disciples and I used to show them modern life – how to run the hot and cold taps and things like that. They seemed alright but it didn’t change my feelings about the Bible jinx.

To me songwriting is more like redemption. I can extract the poison or the pollen, the essence from a situation and the rest becomes a husk that blows away.

While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises.

I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality.

The intellectual development of man, far from having get men away from war, has, rather, on the contrary, bring them to a refinment always more perfected in the art of killing.

I discovered I was passionate about the creative process, the product development, creating a concept around a fragrance or lipstick.

Far too often, children with developmental disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of their observable behavior

What we want is stability and security so we can focus on our own development.

To avoid each other, their eyes had developed an amazing mobility with all the cunning of enemies fearful of meeting each other head on.

An educated person is a person who has so developed the faculties of their mind that they can acquire anything they want.