“I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange I never thought I would be.”

“I believe that I often bring out the best in somebody's talents.”

“I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he's up there with Bryan Ferry.”

“To not be modest about it, you'll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I've worked with have done their best work by far with me.”

“There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.”

“I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.”

“I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.”

“I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me.”

“But I'm pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.”

“I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.”

“The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.”