In a way, I'm always working with Mick Jones. I feel like he's watching over me all the time. We talk about everything: history quite a lot. Balloons and wars and old football players. The Clash.

I used to write songs to get love, but now that I have it, I don't feel the need to anymore.

I wish I had better contact with my family.

Maybe I'm actually an optimist.

The only thing that makes sense to me that I've learnt over the years is knocking tunes together.

I've lived in Liverpool, London, Belfast, Germany, Coventry, Dorset, and Cyprus.

That was my fantasy, actually - to become a billionaire, buy the 'Sun' and the 'Mirror,' and close them down.

I like touring. It's like a school trip.

I'd never say I wouldn't fight a war. In different ages, I would have done. I'd have fought the Vikings.

At school, I was always the new boy, so I always went in for the school play. It was a way of breaking the ice and making friends with pupils and teachers for however long I had before moving on.

I've always enjoyed acting, and there's more than a degree of it involved in singing live on stage.

I've turned my back on fancy parties and red carpets. I'm a writer, and if I did that, I'd never get anything done.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

If it's a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless.

The most powerful force in American politics is not anger, it's nostalgia.

The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.

I was the oldest of seven kids, so I had no older brother who would say, 'Schmuck, don't do that.'

Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.

There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a newspaperman originally in Colombia. He talked about - and I agree - how everybody has a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair.

You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.

For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

In 1962, I wrote a series about 42nd Street called 'Welcome to Lostville.' One result was that the young Bob Dylan read it and invited me to his first concert at Town Hall; the result was a kind of friendship that years later led to my liner notes for 'Blood on the Tracks.'

All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser's locker room.

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.

What would Chaucer have written about if men were perfect?

The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it's not journalism.

I was born in 1935. But my mother and father - who were immigrants from Ireland - and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

I usually wake up at 7, 7:15, without an alarm. I hate the sound of an alarm.

People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off.

For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.

There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it.

Travel at least erodes some of the narrowness that exists in each of us.

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.

In my experience, growing up in Brooklyn and all that, the real tough guys didn't act tough. They didn't talk tough. They were tough, you know? I think about these politicians who try to pose as tough guys - it makes me laugh.

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story.

Every reporter inhales skepticism. You interview people, and they lie. You face public figures, diligently making notes or taping what is said, and they perform their interviews to fit a calculated script. The truth, alas, is always elusive.

You can't edit yesterday's paper.

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.

I think if you had to choose between running a tabloid and being president of the United States, of course you'd run the tabloid, especially in New York.

It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door.

Viewers can't work or play while watching television; they can't read; they can't be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial.

The Anarchists set off World War I with a gunshot in Sarajevo - but they faded away. It wasn't that the police drove them out of business. The ideology had nowhere to go except into permanent negativity.

I'm so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

An independent Brooklyn probably would have built a new stadium for the Dodgers, so today there might be not just baseball but also the only football team on this side of the Hudson.

To me, doctors and nurses and teachers are heroes, doing often infinitely more difficult work than the more flamboyant kind of a hero.

My father lost his leg in 1927 playing soccer. A kick broke his leg; gangrene set in. They sawed it off. So he didn't get what a lot of Irish immigrants got, which was a job on the Waterfront - he didn't get that.