I'm not a good singer.

I don't have religion or culture. I don't have anything I can believe in when I'm really scared. When I play the songs, I feel the fear disappear.

It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.

I want so many artists that I care about to go away and grow up, and have been amazed at how hard that is for some people to do.

I've never been a big movie person, but I used to watch movies regularly in my life, and sometime in the '90s I just stopped. I certainly never was an educated moviegover.

That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.

I don't think any songwriter who comes up through playing clubs can really claim to have independently developed their art. All along the way so much information is coming, the writer inside the performer unconsciously reacts to all of that. By the time they get to be thirty, the writer is gone.

Fan reaction is so out-sized and hyperbolic in rock music compared to other arts.

I ask myself when I see a new album: 'Is this an album that they needed to make, or do they need to just keep making albums?'

I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'

When people tend to be happier they have more interest in the world around them.

There are enough really good love songs and I don't even know if I could write one if I tried.

Mostly i write on an unplugged Mustang or a Baby Taylor.

I have this Martin electric/acoustic that's made of black formica. Really cool.

Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn't care enough to sell more records to do that.

A lot of the Jews I met in Israel, almost all of them are secular. They get turned off by their religion, in the same way that Americans get turned off Christianity by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.

The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

People younger than me trust me. People my age do not. They think I'm up to something. And I've often felt this.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt un-trusted.

When I started the band, the name 'Silver Jews' had no literal meaning - it was just an abstraction.

Strengthening our identity is one way of reinforcing people's confidence and sense of citizenship and well-being.

It is a mistake to separate learning for work and for community and personal development.

Balancing the common good with the freedom and liberty to exercise that individuality has been and remains a challenge for those committed to democracy while understanding that the polis ensures our participation and therefore our citizenship.

I'm in favour of a sensible development of response units and their deployment in any circumstance where there may be a risk to the officers themselves or the neighbourhood they're in. I'm not in favour of a blanket arming of the police.

We've got to get back to old-fashioned politics that's in touch with the people we seek to represent and to avoid self-inflicted wounds.

Children whose parents return to study do much better at school. Offenders who persist with studies are much less likely to reoffend. The national mental health strategy recognises the important role adult learning can play for people recovering from mental illness.

Bishops and judges are some of the best politicians in the world. They know how to manipulate the political process.

That is why with enormous regret I have tendered my resignation to the prime minister today.

For six and a half years, I had responsibility for leading the Labour party policy on education and delivering on our promise of improved opportunities for all our children.

Solidarity and interdependence, a sense of worth, a pride and hope in the future: these are positive gains for those who believe in progressive politics and the beneficial role of government, rather than a detriment.

At school, I was brought up on revolting food - sausages, sausages and Spam - but at home, I had the most wonderful sponge puddings, which I don't indulge in very often now.

How to strike the right balance between our privacy and our expectation that the state will protect us and facilitate our freedom is one of the most difficult challenges facing us all.

The democratic state can sometimes abuse its power as much as those who seek to destroy it abuse fundamental rights and democratic practices.

To punish MPs because of the distance they live from London - those with fast train journeys quite close to London as well as those at some distance from both the capital or an appropriate airport - is perverse, but also dangerous to democracy.

Being an MP is not a desperately hard life, like going down the pit or working in the steelworks - with which I am all too familiar, having been brought up in the city of Sheffield; and it certainly isn't badly paid compared with any of my constituents.

We need to reaffirm that politics is not merely compatible with economic progress and development in the 21st century, but essential to it.

I'm a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.

We need to build on what we know works - local oversight of schools to keep a check on performance, timely interventions in schools to support those at risk of failing, and partnerships between schools to help each one to improve.

Nothing is more important for young people than enhancing their life chances, liberating their potential and encouraging their contribution to a globally competitive and modern economy.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, in hosting the G20 summit and in the budget, must display the same boldness in tackling the instability at home that they do in promoting a worldwide answer to the global meltdown.

Parents don't believe that lifting life-chances in one school means reducing them in another.

The clash between capital and labour, between those seeking to maximise profit and those with only their toil to sell, was the driving force for the creation of the trade unions in the 19th century.

By confirming the importance of politics and politicians in Britain, we can build from the bottom up and begin to reverse the worrying anti-politics trend, which will empower the elite technocrats and leave defenceless the man or woman in the street with a mere vote to cast.

My integrity had been called into question; I was being called a liar, and I am not a liar. And I just think it is time that we stop viewing public figures as fair game.

I prefer a positive view of freedom, drawing on another tradition of political thinking that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek polis.

In Sheffield, we need support from the community and for the community. We need integration with no loss of heritage, and a clear appreciation of what is and is not acceptable.