I just go into the studio, look at the lyrics for the first time when I put them on the piano, and go. If I haven't got it within 40 minutes, I give up. It's never changed, the thrill has never gone, because I don't know what I'm going to get next.

I've always been dead set against festivals - really suspicious and wary.

I'm addicted to working. I mean, I have a list of 100 countries I want to play in. I'm basically killing myself by travelling so much, for no reason whatsoever.

I've never been jealous of anybody's success. I've been flummoxed by it because I don't understand it, but I'm not jealous of it.

As a child, as a teenager, I was kind of not allowed to wear fashionable clothes.

I think performers are all show-offs anyway, especially musicians. Unless you show off, you're not going to get noticed.

For me, music is so passionate, I have to give it my all every time I go onstage. Onstage, it was always comfortable for me, because that's where I felt at home.

When people go to rehab and come out, they go through a difficult period, but I never had that.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

I'm very relaxed. I have a family, I have a partner of 20 years, I have a wonderful life; nothing could be better.

I love every minute of fatherhood, staying up all night, changing nappies, kids crying, I find it really funny and inspiring. It connects you to the world in a new way.

The great thing about small children is they're portable, so we take them everywhere, but when it comes to 2015, Zachary's going to school, and I want to be there to drop him off and pick him up. I don't want to just be the father who reads them a bedtime story.

Once I'd heard 'Modern Times' by Bob Dylan, it really changed the way I wanted to make records.

I'd always lived with people - my family, or had people living with me, because I'd never liked being on my own.

I rarely wear tennis shoes. I'm 5' 8', I hate being short.

I could never go onstage in denims.

I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.

I tour as many countries as possible, and I've toured every state in America, plus every province in Canada.

Everything I thought I'd hate about having children - the crying, the screaming - nothing fazes me. I love it all, and it's relaxed me.

It's just so wonderful to have someone in the house like a child to turn your attention to. It's not about you anymore, it's about this lovely little human being.

Simon Cowell and I are great friends, and we wind each other up. Rod Stewart and I do the same thing.

When I say I don't have to write pop songs anymore, there's no way I'm going to get on the radio at 60 years of age unless I'm doing a duet with Gaga or I was on 'All of the Lights,' which was a Kanye West record that managed to get on the radio.

Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel.

I grew up at my grandmother's house, and she had a beautiful garden. I used to hate mowing the lawn and weeding, which is what you do when you're a kid. I loathe gardening, but I love gardens, and I have two beautiful gardens.

I grew up conservative because my mum was a conservative, and when I finally realized what conservatives were, I changed my mind immediately. As children, we tend to copy our parents.

I'm a great lover of children. I never thought that one day I'd actually be a father, but I'm very pleased that I changed my mind. Children are extremely important. They are the future of the world.

My mum always used to buy a record every Friday.

I'm so proud to be on a Kate Bush record; she's always marched to the beat of her own drum.

When your persona begins to take over your music and becomes more important, you enter a dangerous place. Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

At heart I've always been a music fan. That part of me has never changed since I was a little kid, sitting in a room watching a record go round, looking at the colour of the labels.

I'm not everybody's cup of tea. But sometimes criticism can be hurtful. Be respectful. I'm a good piano player, I can sing well, I write good songs. If you don't like it, fair enough. But give me a break.

I do like my rock stars to be a little larger than life. I don't mind the earnest ones at all, but I do like a bit of individuality.

I am the biggest technophobe of all time.

I hate to say this, but I always listen to the music and the instrumentation first, and then grab on to the lyrics later.

I am so in the past. I'm such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

I never thought of myself as being handsome or good-looking or whatever. I always felt like an outsider.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.