At art school, a teacher said: 'The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.' I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called 'Ice Cream and Wafers.' The next was 'Holding Back the Years.'

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.

I think art is inherently nonviolent and it actually occupies your mind with creation rather than destruction.