Whenever I'm doing anything romantic with an actor, or if there's a director around, I never want anybody's wife to feel threatened by me.

I think that one of the things that you do learn is that falling in love and being in love with someone is a rarity. That you don't fall in love as many times as you think you're going to. And then when you do, it's really special; it's really important.

With actors, all our ages are out there for all to see - you can't hide anything, really. And it's kind of a relief. This is my age, this is what I look like without makeup on - who cares? That youth culture - that lying about your age - it's all denial of death anyway.

I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.

My upbringing has given me sympathy for the idea of isolation and what it is to be a new person in the room, where everyone else has some amount of familiarity and comfort.

I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.

My wife has brought great beauty into my life. And my daughter has brought me nothing but joy. Those qualities were greatly lacking.

I had no expectations about fatherhood, really, but it's definitely a journey I'm glad to be taking. Number one, it's a great learning experience. When my mother told me it's a 24/7 job, she wasn't kidding.

We went online to surrogacy agencies. We interviewed lots of people - and I have to say, with all due respect, some of them were freaks. I was very leery of the process the whole way through.

If I could only get people to rub my belly for good lucky and then throw money in my fountain, it'd be a perfect world.

The surprising thing about fatherhood was finding my inner mush. Now I want to share it with the world.

An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.

I had Hallowe'en parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe.

'The Haunted Man' is about communication barriers between men and women, and in that song it's a woman's wait for her husband to come back from war. The vision for me was of a group of men and women on the opposite sides of two cliffs, trying to move or sing to each other and communicate, but they're kind of misfiring.

In the music industry, intelligence in women is undervalued.

I live in a Moomin house in East London which I fill with blankets and nice crockery and get people round for dinner. When you travel a lot, you feel rootless and adrift - this is my sanctuary, where I can breathe out.

I was a nursery school teacher, and I worked with youth groups. I loved that job. It was exhausting, but you got a lot back - all their purity and insight and innocence is so on the surface, and they're so unrepressed; they'd really scream at you and then give you a massive kiss.

My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious - she's just English.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

My sister is an artist and an interior designer. She went to high school for art. I went to high school for music.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

A strong work of art really leaves people speechless. They feel a little angry because they don't understand it.

I think size is the most unused quotient in the sculptor's repertoire because it requires lots of commitment and time. To me it's the best tool. With size you get space and atmosphere: atmosphere becomes volume. You stand in the shape, in the zone.

Being an actor all of my life is kind of a collaborative, social form of interpretive art. Sitting down with a blank page every day by yourself is a different feeling.

Driving a tractor never appealed to me. But I never wanted to go into business. Had I not accidentally fallen into acting, I would probably have gone home from college and farmed.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

If people think of public art as something the public decides, it's impossible to make anything of substance.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.

Intelligence is a moral category.

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.

I believe it's time that women truly owned their superpowers and used their beauty and strength to change the world around them.

When I got into the music industry, I wasn't focused on being the most famous artist or even getting a major record deal. It was just to make music on my own terms or create my own image, do my own hair, do my own makeup.

Black history is part of American history, and it should be treated as such.

I enjoy how women dressed in the 1920s with the shimmering jewels and rich feathers.