“Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.”

I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

Love isn’t about when you first meet. It’s about the many, many years you spend together, when you’re trying to keep that flame burning.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I try to always go for something very interior, following thoughts and memories, something that I think is difficult to do on the screen, which is essentially a third-person medium.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.

It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.

Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.

It’s a new year, new year, new money, money!

Everyone is constantly transitioning.

Don’t be anything you don’t want to be, always be yourself.

My approach to the races hasn’t changed in my 20-year career. If I have the chance to attack and to pass, I do it, trying to get the best possible result.

Now people think it’s cool to have a baby, but it ain’t cool to take care of it. We have to change that. You make your life for that baby. That’s the future.

I have won on Honda and Yamaha so maybe it is interesting to win with a third team, Ducati, who are Italian.

Clairvoyants can see flashes of colour, constantly changing, in the aura that surrounds every person: each thought, each feeling, thus translating itself in the astral world, visible to the astral sight.