Argument is to me the air I breathe.
Religion deals in certainties and philosophy deals more in un-answered questions.
Obviously classical music tends to be stuff that is usually at least a hundred years old.
I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.
When I'm recording, which is synonymous with writing, I'll play things over and over again until it sounds like I've got the right guitar part. Whereas I think, as the much younger player I tended to do things much more consciously. I didn't wait for the moment where inspiration might strike. That's what I do now. I wait for it to naturally start to replay itself in my mind. As I say, I don't force it. So I like to think of myself as a receiver. I'm a telephone line to who knows where, but until I hear it through that receiver, I don't usually do it. It's got to start writing itself somehow.
I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.
It's funny, when people talk about the 70s I can tell you the year of every album but when it comes to the later efforts I can't remember the exact years, it's funny isn't it?
Make a better friend of every man with whom you come in contact
I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them.
Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.
I let people know that it was all right to do the kinds of things I did.