I'm pretty happy with my career. I just know what I'm capable of.

I don't know why, but despite winning how many world championships, how many Tour stages, and being 31 years old, some people still thought I had to prove myself, you know. So I had to do the Track Worlds to try to prove myself.

The Tour de France is ridiculously hard.

The beautiful thing about cycling is that it is so accessible and that pleased me when I was younger because you felt like you could almost touch the athletes.

Between 20km and 10km to go, you want the whole team at the front. You don't necessarily want to take control, and the speed will be dictated by how many surges you get from the other teams. You don't want to go so fast they can't come, but you want to be just ahead so you're in control.

One thing I do get aggravated by is people shouting with frustration if they get pushed and shoved in sprints. I don't push and shove anyone, but I don't care if somebody does it to me.

A lot of people in the Isle of Man support me and it makes it all worthwhile when people are interested in what you're doing. I dunno if the word 'famous' is appropriate, but I'm quite well known on the Isle of Man.

I started getting into decent food after I got a house in Tuscany, near the British cycling academy's training base. For a cyclist, the area is incredible, with the flats of the basin of Florence, the heights of the Apennines and the small climbs around Chianti.

I love track racing and I'm proud to be a British cyclist and proud to pull on the jersey to represent my country.

It's so ironic that the better you get the easier it becomes to win.

I'm not getting bored with cycling or winning - I love it. But I need to give myself new targets all the time.

For any young rider even competing in the San Remo is one of the biggest things - but to win it is beyond emotion. You can't put it into words.

I have a house in a small town in Tuscany where everybody knows and looks out for each other. That's a similar mentality to on the Isle of Man.

I heal pretty well and I know if I crash on the first day of the Tour de France, I've got to get up and get on with it.

I realised my whole focus each year is about the Tour de France.

The Belgian people, they're so happy.

Training-wise, I don't have an extreme plan I stick to. I know what I have to do, I know the goal. But it's not really structured. That's the beauty of road cycling. It all depends on the conditions on the day and where you are in the world.

When I was younger, I didn't really train for the sprint - I trained to get over the mountains. I have to train it now I'm getting older. But the sprint is more born, rather than made.

I don't listen to any music when I train - I do it outdoors, and I'm not a fan of iPods on bikes.

The way I dig in to push myself through mountain climbs is totally psychological. I'm not designed to do that stuff. It's mind over matter.

It's my job. It's not a hobby, it's how I put food on the table for my family. I have to be on a bike.

I learned from BMX and skateboarding how to take a fall.

Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn't address the social causation of mental illness either.

The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'

The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky's 'Solaris.' When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another of the simulations produced by the inscrutable planet.

What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication.

Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.

Christopher Nolan's 'The Prestige' is an enthralling study of doubles, doubling and duplicity. Its twinned themes are obsession and the Secret: the Secret as objet-a, that which inspires, but which can never satisfy, obsession.

OK, so we all know that 'Borat' is humiliatingly, career-endingly unfunny (one trick too many for one-trick pony Sacha Double-Barelled) - but can anyone explain why the 'character' isn't roundly condemned for being as unacceptably racist as the one-dimensional stereotypes from 70s sitcoms such as 'Mind Your Language?'

Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.

Anti-capitalism is nothing new in Hollywood. From 'Wall-E' to 'Avatar,' corporations are routinely depicted as evil. The contradiction of corporate-funded films denouncing corporations is an irony capitalism cannot just absorb, but thrive on. Yet this anti-capitalism is only allowed within limits.

What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.

If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation.

Like all of Moore's work, 'V for Vendetta' is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

The discussion of 'V for Vendetta' - on Pinocchio Theory in particular - has been far more interesting than the film deserved. Yes, there is a certain frission in seeing a major Hollywood movie refusing to unequivocally condemn terrorism, but the political analysis in the film (as in the original comic) is really rather threadbare.

The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war.

Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, records, and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then.

Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of mass (old) media technology - the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness.

Much of reality TV has been like the worst nightmares of Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard come true, its seductive allure turning us into gossips in the global village.

We're invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its 'dogmatic' intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.

Roxy Music' and 'For Your Pleasure,' those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop's equivalent of 'The Talented Mr Ripley.' The clothes , the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly.

The sustaining fantasy of Nolan's Batman films - which does chime uncomfortably with Romney -is that the excesses of finance capital can be curbed by a combination of philanthropy, off-the-books violence and symbolism.

Abduction was what it felt like on first listening to Public Enemy. Like the post-punks, Public Enemy implicitly accepted the idea that a politics which came reassuringly dressed in established forms would be self-defeating.

Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.

The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another.

When The Fall pummeled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar - and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock - had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.

Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.

Capitalism can never pursue deterritorialization to the absolute. What deterritorialization there is within capitalism is always balanced by a compensatory lockdown onto nation, culture, and race. Hence the 'Steampunk' quality of capitalism, where the most ancient traditions can co-exist with the ultramodern.

The 1890s was perhaps the most Gothic decade ever: 'Dracula,' 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Time Machine,' not to mention 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' were all written between 1890 and 1899.