“There are very few people I can call real, close friends. They’re very, very precious to me.”

I’m very fortunate because I love what I’m doing.

You can’t just find yourself doing something and not happy doing it.

I’ve never regretted anything I’ve ever done.

I always thought the good thing about the guitar was that they didn’t teach it in school.

I will still carry on changing all the time.

You don’t find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn’t mean to say you can’t be really good.

A lot of people can’t be on their own. They get frightened. Isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

I always felt if we were going in to do an album, there should already be a lot of structure already made up so we could get on with that and see what else happened.

I know where I’m going musically. I can see my pattern and I’m going much slower than I thought I’d be going.

I don’t like being stuck in one situation, day to day.

Live Aid did feel like one hour’s rehearsal after several years, but to be part of Live Aid was wonderful. It reall was.

When you hear the melodic structures of what classical musicians put together and you compare it to that of a rock & roll record, there’s a hell of a long way rock & roll has to go.

Everything that came later… the roots are all there in the first album.

I like change and I like contrast.

I’m still terrified of flying. I really have to get drunk to fly. I’ve found that I’ve developed fears I never had before… fears of heights, claustrophobia only in cities, though, never in the country.

I’m not a guitarist as far as a technician goes, I just pick it up and play it. Technique doesn’t come into it.

My friends are my estate.

I am not, at the end of the day, a mother, a wife, a writer, an activist, a friend. I am a child of God. That’s who I was when I came into this world and who I’ll be when I leave it. No one can take that from me.

I feel only my friends and family need to know what is happening in my personal life.

Me and Kendrick [Lamar] have different types of music. He from a different coast; we ain’t in the same lane.

Surround yourself with love, not friends.

In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

I used to choose friends based on similarity in age and life stage, but I’ve learned that those were the wrong criteria. Trying to live life exclusively alongside others our own age is like attempting to climb Mt. Everest without a Sherpa. It’s a little dangerous.