If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.
I don’t really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson. I’m a creative artist. All I know from business I’ve picked up along the way.
When you start a new project, no matter if it’s a movie like Enigma or an album like Goddess, you are always learning something. While I search, I find something new.
Don’t take life too seriously and always remember: it is just a passing fad.
Casanova, he had no money and no power, and according to some, he even was cute. But he had talent to live, and some literature talent. I love how he invented himself.
Of course, I do occasionally arouse primeval instincts, but I mean, most men can do that. They can’t do it to so many. I just happen to be able to do it to several thousand people. It’s fun to do that.
You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant.
I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.
The past is a great place and I don’t want to erase it or to regret it, but I don’t want to be its prisoner either.
Any performer is one person privately and then he’s another person when he steps on the stage.
The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early ’60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.
It’s like everyone I have dinner with, I’m having an affair with. Who was it I met the other day? Minnie Driver! She seems charming, but that’s the only time I’ve met her.
I always think it’s better to be not taking drugs or drinking or anything. That’s not saying I’ve never done it because I have. But I sort of learned I think after a while there has been – it didn’t take me that long to realize that it wasn’t a good thing.
Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can’t be bothered.
Of course we’re doing it for the money. We’ve always done it for the money.
I don’t like drugs. I think cocaine is a very bad, habit-forming bore. It’s about the most boring drug ever invented.
I’m not the businessman. I don’t deal with the business at all. Not anymore. Occasionally, every four years or five years, they tell me I’ve run out of money, I have to go and make some more.
I came into music just because I wanted the bread. It’s true. I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted.
People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It’s very selfish, but it’s understandable.
Music should elevate you. You can be raised, or left stranded. You can’t be raised all the time, in my experience. This might be a rare moment. You might just go up to that level but that’s always good.