I never felt totally 100% patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon and Damascus and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

It begins and ends with money. It's absurd in this day and age when we need so much money for education health for people that a $100 million dollars can be spent on a film. It's obscene.

My wife and I unlike many intellectuals spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

I would like to see more airplay for all artists no matter what age. I think there's a lot of money being spent toward the young guys but a lot of the older guys are the ones who blazed the trail for those young guys.

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.