Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.

When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient.

I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice.

Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.

Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington.

'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.

Sometimes you just do things and let your natural self become a part of what you're doing.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, we played behind the Iron Curtain and sang, 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and I thought, 'We're all going to die. The man is going to get us all killed.' But then you saw all these kids with the American flag and German flags together and singing the song, and it was, wow, like 'We Shall Overcome.'

Being involved in the well-being and advancement of one's own community is a most natural thing to do.

When a fan says, 'Man, you saved my life; I heard 'Jungleland'... and I cried... and I felt joy in my life again,' that's my hall of fame.

The calm mind allows one to connect with the inner self, the Soul, the very source of our being. That's where the music lives. That's where my music comes from.

When you learn a Bruce Springsteen song, it's like learning to ride a bike. You don't forget it.

I wanted an electric train for Christmas but I got the saxophone instead.

When you die, we go back to the white energy of all the white energy: white heat that's flung against the sky and becomes a star.

All this pain is going to come back and make me stronger.

There'll be no oiling up with this band. The oil has been there for years and it only gets better.

As a horn player, the greatest compliment one can get is when a person comes to you and says, 'I heard this saxophone on the radio the other day and I knew it was you. I don't know the song, but I know it was you on sax.'

I look forward to working out every day.

The word spiritual, not the word religious, is the key.

I like health-conscious cooking, but growing up in the South, I do love southern cooking; southern France, southern Italy, southern Spain. I love southern cooking.

In the mental calmness of a spiritual life, I have found that the answers to the whys in our lives are able to come to you. In my music I find the same thing.

I take my job as a rock and roll sax player very seriously. To do it the way that I must do it, I must be in good condition. The better shape you're in, the harder you can rock.

It's a matter of choosing what is most important to you and putting that first. Once you have recognized your true purpose in life, this becomes much easier.

Now that I am much older, I have had a number of sax players tell me I was responsible for them playing sax. Some of them I have admired over the years.

I found out how great the E Street Band is. The reality of a band that you can't scoop aside, can't put in a corner.

When I grew up, there was one music: rock n' roll. Somewhere along the line, there was a separation. I don't know why it happened, but it did happen.

The first time I ever saw a black audience at our concert, we were in Zimbabwe.

When I walk on stage, it's the 'healing floor.' No matter how bad I'm hurting, I get out there and do it.

It's like Liverpool. Everybody went for the music. All the young musicians seemed to gravitate to Asbury Park.

I got into the soul music, but I wanted to rock. I was a rocker.

I was a born rock n' roll sax player.

I grew up with a very religious background.

You had your black bands, and you had your white bands, and if you mixed the two, you found less places to play.

Rock-and-roll, to me, is very serious because we deal with the young people. We deal with people who need something, and that's the same thing that a preacher does. He feeds you something that you need spiritually in your soul and in your makeup.

As long as my mouth, hands, and brain still work, I'll be out there doing it. I'm going to keep going 'til I'm not there anymore. This is what's keeping me alive and feeling young and inspired.

More than 50 percent of kids who play an instrument go on to college, yet music education programs at the inner city public schools who need them most continue to be hit hard with budget cuts.