I don't think I picked up the guitar in the first place as a way of getting women. There are probably better ways of doing it.

I sing like a girl.

I don't agree with superstitious routines, but there are a couple of things I'll always do before performing. I'll get together with the band and chill out, and then, just before I go on stage, I'll always check my flies.

I try to tell one lie in every interview. It keeps people I know amused when they read the article.

I never really set out to do anything in the charts with music. It came as a total surprise that I did, and it's fun.

We are in the entertainment business. This should be fun. We are musicians; we don't save lives. We shouldn't... we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously or be revered that much.

I think I was lucky to be a little older when I became famous. But still, the shock of the world starting to treat you in a weird way... I had come from the army, where we had to deal with life or death, and suddenly, people were asking whether you were cool or not. I have never cared about whether I'm cool.

I haven't had the difficulties in my life that other people have had. I didn't have an unhappy childhood.

The weird thing about the subway is no one looks at each other. So I play the O2 in London. It's a 20,000 capacity venue, and then I'll take the subway to my gig, and everyone's going to my gig, and no one looks at you. If anyone does, they say, 'Hey, you look exactly like James Blunt, only smaller.'

I was an eBay addict before my first album hit big. I wanted to go on this tour of the world, so I started selling everything on eBay.

I think it's always worth remembering that people sending off mean tweets are probably pretty lonely people.

I am a troll. And do you know what? I really don't like social media apart from that aspect of it. Posting pictures of me doing this or that is really boring, but I enjoy engaging with people. I tell them it's just a laugh and to stay in touch if you're getting any grief. They're just opinions.

I probably deserve a bit of a kicking. And having been to boarding school, I've learnt to enjoy a good beating.

I've got the best job in the world.

Touring is the best invention of all time, so if I have to suffer a little bit of payback for having all this fun, then so be it.

I'm self-deprecating because I'm British, and that's what we're supposed to be. I'm sure if I was American, I'd tell you how great I was.

I'm always ready for the enemy to come over the hill. I'm packed and set to go. That comes from my time in the army. I used to travel in a tank, but now it's a tour bus going to safer places.

To call me gay is a compliment. Also, if I'd been macho, I'd just have had an audience full of men.

I found in my writing that I could express emotions that, as an everyday person, I have no interest in expressing: these strange things that girls talk about called feelings.

Space is tight inside a tank: very close confines, and you're permanently banging. Like in Brad Pitt's new movie 'Fury' - the clanking of metal is all you hear.

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.

Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.

There are signs that the age of petroleum has passed its zenith. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil now sells for three times its long-run average. The large western oil companies, which cartellised the industry for much of the 20th century, are now selling more oil than they find, and are thus in the throes of liquidation.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

All UK nuclear power stations should be shut down without delay.

The use of refined petroleum as fuel, which began in the 1850s, freed hundreds of millions of people from the toil of centuries, gave hundreds of millions more a life of ease and plenty, and, by allowing great cities to feed themselves from every corner of the world, multiplied the population of the earth fivefold.

What holds an Arab leader in power is a mixture of violence and prestige. Both President Assad and King Hussein were felt to have defended Arab interests against the world. That, in the end, is more important than what they wear on their head.

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves.

For all their current prestige, Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories, however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.

Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.

It is time to end the western policy of malign neglect. It is in the interest of the whole world to help tackle the actual grievances in Palestine, Kashmir, and in central and southern Iraq, and to help the region out of its economic backwardness.

Whatever else it was, Adolf Hitler's short-lived regime was also a colossal industrial process by which the wealth and productive power of much of Europe was wrenched from its normal purposes and converted into a machine for killing.

One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.