"It's a miracle was the last track recorded for the album, we based it on the rhythm from the middle of 'Late Home Tonight, where there's Graham Broad playing lots and lots of drums with me shouting in the background, pretending to be a mad Arab leader."

"We were contracted to make a soundtrack album but there really wasn't enough new material in the movie to make a new record that I thought was interesting."

"Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records."

"I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs."

"I'm in competition with myself and I'm losing."

"I would not rule out going to Israel because I disapprove of the foreign policy any more than I would refuse to play in the UK because I disapprove of Tony Blair's foreign policy."

"I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see."

"Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world."