You know, I was never totally thrilled with being a Fleetwood Mac member, but surprisingly, I was having such a good time reuniting with John, Mick, and Stevie.

That's one strength that Stevie has. She's really not a strong instrumentalist in any way. Her instrument is her voice and her words. And it keeps her focused on the very center of that.

All of my style came from listening to records.

Those 12 years, they were ambiguous at best.

Another thing that was unique about working on this stuff was that I was engineering it. I used many of the things I had learned while I was away from the band. It sort of vindicated my decision to leave in '87.

You know, I was never totally thrilled with being a Fleetwood Mac member, but surprisingly, I was having such a good time reuniting with John, Mick, and Stevie.

I'm also married for the first time, and I have two kids. So there's some kind of good karma right now.

I was playing a Fender Telecaster when I first joined.

When Stevie and I joined the band, we were in the midst of breaking up, as were John and Christine. By the time Rumours was being recorded, things got worse in terms of psychology and drug use. It was a large exercise in denial - in order for me to get work done.

The 12 years I was in Fleetwood Mac before were not particularly happy years. I was not in a very good place, psychologically, when I left. I didn't have a lot of confidence in what I was doing.

I didn't take lessons, and I don't know my scales.

But by taking the time away, getting myself off the treadmill, and just slowing down and learning, I felt I had so much more to give back. And maybe that was something that needed to happen for all of us.

Years on, Christine and John still have a deep love for each other, as do Stevie and I - we've been working together since I was 17.

After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.

I also learned to be more confident, to trust my instincts more.

The writing is all done, so it's all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there's a bit of politics involved, so it's a different thing.

That's basically what's going on now: Everything is propaganda.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

Confounding people's expectations was a way to maintain integrity.

That's the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together.

Even though I had pushed through the Tango album, it was just not a very good environment to be in on a daily basis. In many ways, this is the best time of my life.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

This time, there were no drugs involved. The hours were completely normal daytime hours. I think we were able to appreciate the interplay, where before we had taken it for granted.

It's really touching that we can come back after so long and care about making an album that says as much as this one does. And after all this time, we really do care about each other.

When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.

Ironically, that was quite a bit of the appeal of Rumours. It's equally interesting on a musical level and as a soap opera.

I had to seal off my feelings about Stevie while seeing her every day and having to help her, too. But you get on with it. What was happening to the band was much bigger than any of that.

They tried to get me to use a pick when I first joined the band. They had certain things they thought were appropriate. I tried to adapt as much as I could.

I just find things that work and embellish them.

When you become successful on the level that Fleetwood Mac did, it gives you financial freedom, which should allow you to follow your impulses. But oddly enough, they become much harder to follow.

The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is really a cleansing thing.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.