“It is an artist’s duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.”

My teeth have never been touched. Why did I tell you that? Knock on wood. I’ve got a few scars over the eyes, a couple on the chin, a few on the beak and one across the cheek. But my luck is running out.

I’ve dubbed myself as an amateur, not because I work in different field, but because I do what I do for love.

We tend to take a great deal for granted, because you feel like you’re going to live forever. It’s only if you lose a friend, or maybe have a near-death experience, [that] many events and people in your life suddenly attain real significance.

One of my biggest problems in life has been my inability to lie.

I gave up drinking lots of whiskey and began to practice yoga and meditation. As a result I am not dead.

I’ve always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the ’80s it was a surprise to me.

When I was better known than her, she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother, but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because ‘you aren’t going to make a living doing that.’ I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh.

Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don’t like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen.

I’m going to get a pair of wire-snips, and I’ve also started a new campaign to have blank CDs on jukeboxes so you can play the silence.

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh’s life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.

Failure is fantastic, because you meet yourself and get to know your limitations. This is how I express myself, and I can’t do it any other way.

The most challenging work I’ve seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, ‘A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards’, is apt in these days of witless chancers.

I did not like prizes at school. I didn’t like tests or exams, or the 11+, or O-levels. Later I hated B.A.s and M.A.s. The reason I hated them is that I don’t like being tested, failed or falsely praised by anyone.

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.

I have been young and am now old, and have not yet known an untruthful man to come to a good end.

This is the end of this subject for me for a long time.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

To become a star is the beginning of the end. I don’t really want to be saddled with a screen persona.

the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions – and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.

A preposition is a word You mustn’t end a sentence with!

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.