When you come from desperate poverty and that's exactly what I come from you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never ever anything like a solution.

Yeah exactly you can talk about politics in music you can talk about something else but that's always going to change and love is never going to change.

I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way.

I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends.

One will never again look at a birch tree after the Robert Frost poem in exactly the same way.

A man will treat a woman almost exactly the way he treats his own interior feminine. In fact he hasn't the ability to see a woman objectively speaking until he has made some kind of peace with his interior woman.

People often complain that music is too ambiguous that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the opposite and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that they never translate exactly.

I love the movies and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me and I spent a year or a year and a half of my life working on it.

If I'm on location on some island we usually get up at four in the morning to set up. By seven thirty we're on the beach working until noon then we rest. It's not exactly a vacation.