The first album was a very successful record. It made me very visible and it's an immediate association, but I don't do that anymore. Now I'm true to myself as an artist again. I'm more vocally oriented.
I cannot learn creation from other people; I've got to do it myself. Now, honestly, I regret not studying - I don't know about harmonies, or anything, so if I'm composing a song, it's really hard.
At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
Actually, I never really look at myself as a real radical activist; I am more the conservative. I mean, the conservatives are trying to conserve; the radicals are destroying the planet.
Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.
If some actress thinks she is sexy and she can dance, it's her choice. I do what I want to do, and I set my own benchmark. I will never compare myself with anyone.
If I ran into a 19-year-old version of myself, I'd just tell her to live, full out. I might also tell her to go ahead and have a few babies and not worry about the timing of it.
I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.
I couldn't disappoint people. I did not want to fail and exhaust myself, because I was the kind of runner who trained so little that I couldn't race again within another 10 days.
If I only drink beer, nothing stronger, then by the end of the night I can generally recognize myself as a reasonable human being, and more importantly, wake up that way.
I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.
First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm.
I find myself seeking out the commonalities of our different religious experiences with hopes of encouraging, through my writings, the most hopeful, loving and redemptive qualities in all of us.
That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.
While growing up in Birmingham around a lot of West Indian people, reggae and calypso were big influences early on but Otis Redding was the one person who made me wanna sing myself.
I've put myself forward to be involved. Whether I get picked, we'll have to wait and see. Obviously everybody is excited about it, about the Olympics coming to London and the football being played in different parts of Britain.
I have always considered myself to be very fortunate. To play for the biggest club in the world, which also happens to be the team I supported as a boy, means I have never had to consider changing away from Manchester United.
I had to learn to do everything because I couldn't find another kindred soul. Now you see eighty people listed doing the same things I was doing by myself.
But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.
I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.
I run; I am a coward at heart. I swear, when I smell violence or aggression the coward comes out in me. I have no desire to fight anybody except myself.
