“Unlike the rest of everyone I hang around with, I don’t drink, so I remember what happened after shows. And I have never hit on anyone after a show, I’m not that kind of person. Even if I was attracted to someone, I’d be too shy.”

Audiences tend to dig the earlier stuff by any given musician, and the artists themselves always tend to prefer the thing that they’re doing now.

I think the younger kids need to realize there’s this whole forgotten 90s that people don’t really talk about.

I like my solitude, and I’m a strong-willed person; I’m a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.

I’m not the guy in the dress with the blood and the unrequited gay whatever – which, according to my psychiatrist, my gayness is a form of narcissism but you’ll have to ask him about that.

I don’t have anything to prove.

You’re always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that’s maybe even too weird for your own taste.

Everybody just needs to realize that when you write something you’re just in one mood. I was told I needed to write it and it was overdue; I don’t even remember what day it was.

I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn’t really want attention.

I’m glad to play for them. But I’d rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to paint, too. I’d like to try everything, but music is my reason for living.

And then you realize that your friends – your real-life friends – it’s not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you’re doing than how you’re doing.

It’s just different today. Nobody seems to last too long these days. I wouldn’t know how to get started today.

I don’t have the capacity to write stuff consciously. When I do, it’s really awful.

Talk to Arto Lindsay and I’m sure he’s tired of people asking him about DNA; he’s probably really into what he’s doing now, which is good stuff.

There’s not like this separate caste system where it’s like, “I’m the musician, you’re the audience. Never the two shall meet.” It was a case where it was like, “Hey, you know what? I’m on your level, man.”

I played the theme from Twin Peaks on a little tiny Casio keyboard. People politely applauded. I just fell in love with that song and thought it was very heartbreaking.

I think if everyone agrees that that’s the goal then it doesn’t matter who’s the band and it doesn’t matter who’s the producer. It just means that that you try to realise the ambition no matter what the situation is or who the people are.

But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.

Everyone just wants to hear the exact jokes that apply to them and want to – everyone wants a perfectly crafted joke for them.

Everyone knows that! Hobbes: I’m looking it up. Calvin: You do, and I’ll look up that 12-letter word you played with all the Xs and Js! Hobbes: What’s your score for ZQFMGB? Calvin: 957.

I love ‘Goodfellas’ because it’s a great movie – it’s funny and there is action at perfect points. I just think Martin Scorsese makes everyone look really cool.

Everyone’s got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It’s a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one.

Everyone expects us to have a sense of urgency for life’s big things. Life measures us by how we engage ourselves in the little things.

Everyone I love I pay.