We're all anti-royalist, anti-patriarch. Cos it's 1989. Time to get real.

I am gentle. I think nearly everyone who makes music is sensitive - I don't care how hard they pretend they are.

I thought it would be more interesting to make a musical autobiography than an actual autobiography.

I don't actually personally get off on guitar music.

I like a lot of that Chicago stuff, house music.

It's a horrible name, Coldplay. It doesn't conjure up any positive thoughts.

I love karaoke - I usually do Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass,' or 'Try A Little Tenderness.'

I went to a friend's 40th in Manchester, and there was a karaoke machine, and no one was having a go. My mate said, 'No one's singing because you're in the room.' I said, 'Who am I, Frank Sinatra?' They made me sing flipping 'My Star' to a backing track that sounded like '80s Roxy Music. It was pretty embarrassing, but I did it.

Stardom's transitory. Nothing really changes except people's attitudes.

I used to be one of those kids who couldn't keep my mouth shut.

My sister bought me the Koran in 1990. I always thought the stories in it were magical.

I've always said prayers.

They've had a hard life, the Oasis brothers. They've done really well to be semi-normal. It's always sad when your dirty linen is brought out in public.

I was skint, and I had to move back to my mum and dad's house, back into the room I shared with my brother when I was a kid. I kept getting people on the streets telling me that they loved me; it didn't mean anything to me because I was still borrowing tenners off my pensioner father to go and get some chicken.

Getting a grey beard's not cool.

I'd love to see the world without liquor for a week.

In March 1977, I taped the single 'Career Opportunities' off Piccadilly Radio, which was the '70s equivalent of downloading, and then the album came out in April 1977.

I was really into punk when I was about 14.

The Roses should have made it as the biggest band since The Beatles, but we didn't.

I wasn't on stage to be worshipped or for people to look up to me. I was with the crowd.

We started out to finish groups like U2 - that was what it was all about.

You're never alone on the dole in Manchester.

The jails are full of kids from kids' homes. You're 16 years old, and you're out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you've not had an education? You're going to turn to crime.

People want to adulate people.

At primary school, I thought I was George Best. Then I got to secondary school, and it was more serious.

We should be growing carrots up the side of the Empire State Building or Big Ben.

Permacultures - where you use the immediate environment to grow food - should be mandatory.

People have to realise you don't help African children singing along to 60-year-old men playing their tunes from 40 years ago.

I'm only really good at making music. I wasn't convinced when I started out, but then I heard the first Stone Roses' LP.

Everything I've ever achieved, I've done on my terms.

Honestly, going solo is the second best thing that's ever happened to me after my kids.

You're never going to improve on a Michael Jackson song if you cover it.

I'd never been paid for the first Roses LP - it was 2002 before we received any royalties.

My wife is Mexican, and she's really influenced me: She's got an impressive collection of Mexican music.

Every time I do interviews, they ask me about the same things - poverty, war, and the power of the church.

I always loved Oasis because when they came out, they did express that they loved us, and they saw that we did it, and they thought they could do it, too.

One thing I've always loved and rated me dad for is that, because of him, I've never seen the Queen's Christmas speech.

By 1993, the Stone Roses had become this huge, beautiful cruise ship just floating about in the middle of nowhere with no captain.

We're the most important group in the world.

Even on songs we've got that are about a girl, there's always something there that's a call to insurrection.

We're against hypocrisy, lies, bigotry, show business, insincerity, phonies, and fakers.

I never wanted to be a pop singer, but I always watched pop programs and knew I could do better than the people I was seeing.

We believe that anyone can do anything, and everyone's a star. And that's evident from the shows we do. It just feels like a whole bunch of people in a room celebrating something - maybe just being alive.

With the Roses, I knew we were great; I felt that we would achieve something. On my own, I had no idea.

If I was in the gutter, and my kids lived on the kerb, I'd go and get a job in B&Q before I'd reform the Roses. I gave everything I had to the Stone Roses and ended up hitting a brick wall. I'm never going to give anyone a foothold on that wall again.

Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes - that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it's... all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There's billions spent on rockets up there, and there's millions starving down here. It don't make sense to me.

I feel like the Roses were a great group, but I never wanted to try to do it again. I knew I couldn't get a band that would compare to the Roses, that would have an impact like the Roses.

I've got six solo albums. I've been round the world three times. I don't even think about the Roses.

I went into jail with absolutely no respect whatsoever for authority, and I came out with even less.

England's a small nation, and the pop music industry is built on fashion.