Like any parents, mine wanted me to have a secure job with a regular wage and career prospects. And the one job my father knew of, that he'd had experience of himself, was the army, so he could help me in that direction.

I guess if you're stupid enough to join the army without thinking about getting shot at, then you really are a fool.

Like any parents, mine wanted me to have a secure job with a regular wage and career prospects. And the one job my father knew of, that he'd had experience of himself, was the army, so he could help me in that direction.

My life is brillant, My love is pure.

Absolutely, it's a really weird stage because at the minute, I can walk down the street and be unrecognised, lead a normal life, but my label and everybody is warning me that will be changing and I'm in for a rollercoaster ride.

You can't break my spirit, it's my dreams you take.

If the Army helped towards my tuition fees I would then give them four years of my life.

It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.

'Top Gear' changed people's perceptions of me. I've had much more positive responses from my TV appearances than written articles. And I have the weirdest voice.

Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.

I am very happy to say I look just like my dad. But mothers always think their children are prettier than they really are, and mine has always told me I look like Tom Cruise.

I don't agree with superstitious routines, but there are a couple of things I'll always do before performing. I'll get together with the band and chill out, and then, just before I go on stage, I'll always check my flies.

I don't think I picked up the guitar in the first place as a way of getting women. There are probably better ways of doing it.

I have been told by people that I should not be seen clubbing with good-looking women, but I can't see why not. Why be a pop star otherwise?

I have fun with it and I am honest and open about the way I lead my life and don't mislead anyone. I've had the time of my life and thank God for that, it would be such a waste otherwise.

I know I'm a pop star. But sometime I'd like to be a rock star.

I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.

I relax by catching up with my friends and family. When I am at home in Ibiza, I find the contrast of living on a divided island relaxing - with beauty and tranquillity in the north and a sense of fun, shallowness and celebration in the south.

I think having toured the world and seeing many places, I've just been blown away by how we've really scarred our home. I'm as guilty as the next person if not more so. I travel a lot. The damage we do to our planet is huge.

I try to read everything that I can about myself because Saddam Hussein didn't read his reviews and he thought he was winning!

I'm quite British in the sense of not expressing my emotions much. I save it for my songs. If you ask about a death in the family, or a lover, I will not be emotional. I'd probably answer with a smile. Because that's what we British blokes do.

If you have good songs and a real desire to make music, the next thing to do, instead of approach record companies, is to get yourself a really good manager because then it allows you to focus on your profession of being a musician. Then they can focus on the darker art of the record label and the music industry.

In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'

It's always nice to be able to capture your life's experiences in a song and hold the emotion in that way.

My grandparents live in Cley, and my dad now has the windmill which is a guest house. So I've spent much time up there, but a lot of it was at school as well, and my dad was sent abroad so often as well with the army.

School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.

Sometimes, reading my own media, the negativity can upset me, but I just deal with things on a positive basis. I mean, I have up to 20,000 people singing my words back to me on a nightly basis - they share my hopes and fears, and they relate to my own life experiences. Life can be pretty isolating, but that connection is always amazing.

The showbiz world has to be manipulated to make it more interesting because most people's lives are boring.

Things take a long time, but when it's right things move fast.

War is devastating, and it leaves its scars for generations.

Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

They're not shooting me for deserting the United Stated Army - thousands of guys have done that. They're shooting me for bread I stole when I was 12 years old.

The liberation movement which I led in Algeria, the organization that I created to fight the French army, was at first a small movement of nothing at all. We were but some tens of people throughout Algeria, a territory that is five times the size of France.

Maybe the answer to Selective Service is to start everyone off in the army and draft them for civilian life as needed.

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

The army teaches boys to think like men.

It takes but one positive thought when given a chance to survive and thrive to overpower an entire army of negative thoughts.

Even though the National Guard and Army Reserve see combat today, it rankles me that people assume it was some kind of waltz in the park back then.

A zeal for the defence of their country led these heroes to the scene of action, though with a few men to attack a powerful army of experienced warriors.

Most of the services staff is for the larger corporations, not so much for small and medium businesses because they cannot afford an extensive services army.

Our strategy is to defend ourselves against an occupying army and against settlers and settlements.

The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone.

We were pretty good mates until the Beatles started to split up and Yoko came into it. It was more like old army buddies splitting up on account of wedding bells.

As I look back over my life, before I had any real identity, I was a traveler. I grew up an Army brat, a runaway, an activist, and a musician. All my life I've been traveling.

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.

You know too well the forces which compose their army to dread their superior numbers.

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.