When men reach their sixties and retire they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties during the great witch-hunts when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

Too many younger artists critics and curators are fetishizing the sixties transforming the period into a deformed cult a fantasy religion a hip brand and a crippling disease.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way - I hope it never will.

To her audience Janis Joplin has remained a symbol artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion things to make life easier for men in fact.

In the sixties everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.