“And we’d drink huge amounts of scotch and coke, which is a ghastly sweet drink… And now people don’t drink nearly as much, for good reason. We’re all a little wiser.”

Sometimes I had to room with Tony Kaye and that was awful.

I don’t really remember a whole lot of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, really.

I didn’t write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn’t.

One of the great things about having good players in your band is that you just ask them questions. You can pick up some good information that way.

If I was hearing something I couldn’t do, I would figure out how to do it.

We used to drink an awful lot of alcohol.

I listen to Bill Stewart play the drums and when I have finished doing that, I listen to Bill Stewart.

Entertainment is about telling everybody that everything is alright but music is on the side of the upsetters and that’s where I’m at.

Holding on to some of your uniqueness is the trick instead of surrendering it at the Academy of Contemporary We’re Gonna Make You a Star.

At the end of the whole day of working with people you want some privacy.

You learn so much about music from all the people you surround yourself with – good, bad and indifferent. It’s extremely hard to be specific.

So I have the classic amateur’s technique; I know some very tricky bits and I have large gaping holes.

We were from totally different social backgrounds. This is what is very hard for an American to understand, but we could have been five guys from Mars.

I warm naturally to the drummer whose ideas and approach are strong, even if he doesn’t quite have the ability to carry them out.

And I like messing around in the engine room of music. Seeing what happens in the rhythm section area.

We can be so focused on the nuts and bolts that we overlook the importance of individuality – the broader picture, if you will.

I drink a lot, probably too much. My scene while writing lyrics is always a bottle of scotch and stacks of note cards, pencil and pencil sharpener. I throw around note cards and drink.

There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.

I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.

I started drinking Scotch just to be a man.

An appreciation of prose is learned, not instinctive. It is an acquired taste, like Scotch whisky.