The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2.

Big shows are more like events and small shows are more like traditional gigs.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

I heard the Bloc Party record Japan before it came out in the UK as they are on the V2 record label. I think it has a great vibe and has great songs. I also think the Kings of Leon are right up my street.

The story behind every song is individual to itself.

The Millennium Stadium thing was for the Tsunami concert. It was a thing that I think every band in the country would have liked to be a part of at the time that it happened.

Like all bands, the first two albums are always the ones most written about, and the most covered. When a band gets to their third of fourth album, the story of the band has already been told.

To remain relevant though, I think making great records is the key.

The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick.

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman came to see our show, We all had a drink before they set off on their travels, and we kept in touch.

When you are on tour in the UK it takes a few hours to get anywhere. A lot of the time you can have a beer, close your eyes for two minutes, and then you are there. In the U.S. it is much more like a road trip as all the cities are so spread apart.

The press will naturally come and go as it has done with all artists, from David Bowie to Neil Young to U2.

Avril Lavigne sold a massive amount of albums and she has to top that with her next release. We have four great albums behind us, and it's not going to be as hard to live up to that.

It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane.

I'm not a betting man.

Revising a screenplay is much more frustrating than revising a song because you have to read through the entire work again while you are changing stuff. It is a lot easier to edit a song.

Japan is quite weird because they wait for you to say something before they respond. You can literally hear a pin drop, they don't make a sound until you say something to the crowd.

We changed every lead in our whole system, and to this day we still don't really know why it did it. We think wires were touching and faulting. That was it really, but it didn't make it any easier.

We didn't really want to be an overnight success as that brings with it its own problems.

I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. It reminds me of when we were just starting out because we would open for other bands in the beginning.

When I first knew I was having children, I thought I wanted boys, but then I thought I'd be better with girls. I'm quite sensitive, and you get more cuddles with girls. And they like their dads.

Whether I'm telling stories in songs or if directing is the next step, being a storyteller is what I like doing.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.

Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter.

Idol has pretty much taken me out of my recording and out of my choreography. I have managed to slip in some choreography jobs. And I've been writing songs for other artists.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

I hate artists who are not of their time.

Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.