“Punk is always something that’s going to be with us and to try and explain that would be stupid at this point.”

There’s nothing wrong with being a loser, it just depends on how good you are at it.

We stayed very close to each other [with Leek Kirk], and Lee was amazing.

I started off small and then this was just the great opportunity.

To do something that you feel in your heart that’s great, you need to make a lot of mistakes. Anything that’s successful is a series of mistakes.

With my family, my sons both love music and play music, and they’re really good at it.

It’s not necessarily getting older or the change that comes with it, I think it’s more about the memories that you have. Where you can look at your life in these eras.

Never run in the rain with your socks on.

I started getting in the groove of it and it was really fun. I love being a rookie at stuff. It makes it feel vital. I love doing things I’ve never done before, and I love making stuff.

I think it’s your own choice if you turn from an angry young man to a bitter, old bastard.

It’s not only exciting to watch, but you can also speak a different language with each other. It’s a music language that’s unique, compared to what other parents do, especially in their professional lives. Not everybody can talk about being an accountant.

I took a gamble in becoming an actor and my dream job has been realised.

In every song I write, whether it’s a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.

I think everybody should get married. Boys and girls. Girls and boys. Boys and boys! Girls and girls! Shouldn’t we all be entitled to a family-Civil rights baby it’s civil rights. It doesn’t get any better here in Berkeley I’ll tell you that.

I love my friends and family, but playing, that’s my DNA.

It came up after doing St. Jimmy on Broadway for American Idiot. I loved acting, and so I just kept my options open.

I don’t care what you do, I just don’t want to be a mud hippie like you. [From 1994 woodstock]

I was about 16 when punk started to happen… It felt like you had this naive idea that you could change things just by wearing something.

I was about 16 when punk started to happen. It was so exciting. You had a social depression going on in the U.K. There was a sanitation strike. London was really grim, gray. You had Margaret Thatcher coming in. It was a really revolutionary time.

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.

The thing about punk is that there are purists. Once you start going outside of that, they don’t think what you’re doing is punk rock.

Punk will never be dead to me. It’s my life. I can never just drop this lifestyle. It embodies me.

Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers.

I always thought we had more in common with punk than with anything else, but we had long hair, so we didn’t fit in that box.

In the 70s, what thrash was there? Punk came on, and that was cool. But there was no thrash.