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"The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage."
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"Music reveals the deepest beauty of the soul."

"If I had the choice, I would sing only love songs."

"Music made me kinder. Music made me a lover."
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"Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true."

"I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man."

"Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America."

"Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre."

"A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending."

"Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes."

"What we learned quite early on is what was really important to early British pop that we produced-and this is where we were distinct from almost everybody else in this respect-is that it had to reflect exactly what the audience wanted us to say."

"It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance."

"What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh."

"I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf."
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