I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.

In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.

There's always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That's what life is made of. I don't know anything else. If there is, tell me about it.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

Even today, skiffle is a defining part of my music. If I get the opportunity to just have a jam, skiffle is what I love to play.

I'm not a rock singer and I don't want to be a rock singer. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to get across.

You've got to separate the singer and the songs.

As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.

These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.

I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.

Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.

I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.

I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.

Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.

When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.

A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception.

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.

I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!

I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.

I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.

Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.

I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.

I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.

I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.

I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.

The future is keeping you out of the present time.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

What you see is what you get.

A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.

For a long time, I couldn't actually deal with playing concerts; it was a totally alien concept to me, 'cause I was used to playing in clubs and dance halls.

I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.

I put out records to this day that are not necessarily in a sequence of anything. Some could be written a while back, some not. There is no set pattern.

I think when you get past your second album, it all becomes something of a routine. So you have to struggle against that, find a way of making what you do sound fresh and new each time.