“I used to be a folk singer, but I was… dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog.”

I think age is terribly overrated. You’re okay as long as you don’t grow up. By all means grow old, but don’t mature. Remain childlike, retain wonder, the ability to be flabbergasted by something.

I loved Japan. I used to read a lot about it when I was a child. And I always wanted to go. And it was delightful. I absolutely loved it. What a smashing place.

I don’t have wild dogs chasing people with scripts away from my door. I get my share. I’ve done okay. But I usually do independent stuff because that’s mostly what I’m offered.

When I was 12, we went from Glasgow to Aberdeen on a school trip. It was called fresh air fortnight.

There’s nothing like it, but it’s not as good as you think it’s going to be. . . . I was disappointed because there are records of people finding things that have been there for years. I was hoping for a shirt button, or my club’s badge – but not a sausage.

Don’t buy one of those baby intercoms. Babies pretend to be dead. They’re bastards, and they do it on purpose.

In Mexico, everything on the menu is the same dish. The only difference is the way it’s folded.

I don’t understand art-speak. My pictures are big doodles. I’m amazed what people come up with when they look at them.

There’s a fine line you have to tread because you don’t know who is out there in the auditorium. A lot of people are too easily offended.

Life is supposed to be fun. It’s not a job or occupation. We’re here only once and we should have a bit of a laugh.

I was brought up as a Catholic. I’ve got A-level guilt.

There’s one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

I loathe hecklers. I haven’t got a good syllable to say. When you come out of the club circuit and into the concert hall, they should be gone.

I don’t believe in angels, no. But I do have a wee parking angel. It’s on my dashboard and you wind it up. The wings flap and it’s supposed to give you a parking space. It’s worked so far.

I decided to stop drinking while it was still my idea.

Politically correct is the language of cowardice.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life’s hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

When I drove for British teams… they called me The Tadpole because I was too small to be a frog.

I liken myself to Henry Ford and the auto industry, I give you 90 percent of what most people need.

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where noone notices the contrast of white on white.

Fog and hypocrisy – that is to say, shadow, convention, decency – these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.