The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting any more than it has any reason for ending.

I don't listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It's all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You'd have an entire story in song. I never listen to like white music - I couldn't sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

I've never had a very quiet voice. I tried in choir to make it smaller and it just didn't work out. And I listened to a lot of soul music when I was growing up on my own accord. But I was mostly into Mama Cass and Gladys Knight and they all had big voices too just different than mine.

When people hear good music it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world in a self-constructed ghetto.

Nature's music is never over her silences are pauses not conclusions.

I think that a song when it works never mind a piece of long form music even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own ideally.

Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?

Marilyn Monroe never sold a platinum album. And more people know my music than what I look like.

I never gave up on country music because I knew what I was doing was not that bad.

I'm quite private. And I never wanted to be the biggest star in the world really. So in that sense I've got a good balance of doing great shows of making an appearance every now and then and writing music and I don't really have to do much else.

Oh I will always be honest with my music. The records are black boxes for me. Like if you want to know who I am my views my perspective things I love things I hate my convictions my anthems. I've never let people's opinions affect the way I write.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.

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.

In a weird kind of way music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.