“I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I put it all down – I’m out on a limb here, so watch my back.”

I’m not talking with an American accent. I haven’t gone off and become Sammy Hagar.

Such a human waste, your eyes without a face.

When talking about marriage, Allah says your spouses are garments for you. A garment may or may not fit perfectly-but either way, it covers imperfections, protects, and beautifies.

The biggest misconception people have about me is that I’m stupid.

Elvis a fight the dying light, Johnny Ray he’s always crying.

I am quite a romantic person, really, and I should have put that into my music earlier, but I was probably denying it…

Part of the punk attitude was that you should project your music through your whole body… show your personality as much as possible.

I love it when someone insults me. That means that I don’t have to be nice anymore.

If I only had the chance, I’d ask one to dance, and I’d be dancing with myself.

Rock isn’t art, it’s the way ordinary people talk.

Well there’s nothing to lose And there’s nothing to prove I’ll be dancing with myself.

I didn’t want to be soft because I felt I had to be so hard to get people to believe in me.

When I started out, everyone seemed to be adopting these names… Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. I wasn’t really Rotten or Vicious or Nasty, so I wanted something a bit more funny – yet something that seemed real rock ‘n’ roll… something that acknowledged my ambition.

There was a time when my whole life was in chaos, really, and I didn’t help myself sort it out. But one day I came to my senses, and I think I was lucky because a lot of people don’t.

The world goes on, you go on and you change. You want to show the fans those changes, and you want to be able to verbalize them.

I’m not trying to hide from my past. I want to roll in it. Like a dog, rolling in feces.

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.

That cactus went right through my eye. It left my eye flat. They took me to a doctor, and he said, ‘We’ll have to take the eye out.’ …I fought like a tiger. I said, ‘No! Leave the eye alone.

On 139 and Lenox Ave there’s a big park, and if you’re soft don’t go through it when it gets dark

You can’t see the glory of life if you haven’t seen the dark side of life.

I feel funny about owning art. I don’t really want to say: “Wow, come and see my Monet – it’s in a dark room at the bottom of my cellar.”

I wanted to make a massive work so as soon as Nick Mitzevich invited me I said yes straight away and began to make the work.

You deal with failure – strike, strike, strike – all the time. Acting is like that. You have to have a very thick skin in a way – your hair is too dark, you’re too ugly for the part, your audition wasn’t good.