 Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag. |
| You've got to separate the singer and the songs. |
| These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over. |
| When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now. |
| I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game. |
| The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport. |
| What you see is what you get. |
| I educated myself. To me, school was boring. |
| I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice. |
| I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything. |
| A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception. |
| It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down. |
| There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles. |
| I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous. |
| I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple. |
| Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach. |
| You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense. |
| I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out. |
| There's always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That's what life is made of. I don't know anything else. If there is, tell me about it. |
| I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times! |
