“Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we’d have done it. That’s the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, ‘were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?’”

Music can’t change the world.

We’re looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition… doesn’t matter if it’s death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty.

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce, men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure.

So when I got to 50 I just thought, Hold on: I’m thin. I’ve got my hair. I’m well off. I survived, you know

They thought they were Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. In fact, they were more like Tom and Jerry

But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is part of being human, and some people view it as a learning experience etc.

It’s really very simple, Governor. When people are hungry they die. So spare me your politics and tell me what you need and how you’re going to get it to these people.

Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it.

I don’t think anyone sets out to malign poor people but certainly that’s what we do through organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

I’m sure I’m very difficult to live with because of my make-up and personality.

When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks.

You cannot even begin to understand contemporary African politics if you have not read this fascinating book

Blair has called Africa ‘a scar on our conscience’. It is more. It is the gaping wound of the world’s soul.

Rock and Roll is instant coffee.

Men who are not given any voice in this because of the secret nature of the courts, what they’re left with is dressing up ridiculously, but at least using humour to try and draw attention to their kids

Music is still above all else the thing that does it for me

Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills.

The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom.

Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space.

I used to have an imaginary friend named Michael.