"Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana."

"I think Led Zeppelin must have worn some of the most peculiar clothing that men had ever been seen to wear without cracking a smile."

"Alone I'm nothing."

"I have to try and change the landscape, whatever it is."

"Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom."

"The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy."

"It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first."

"The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals but most people stuff themselves like cattle."