I just miss – I miss being anonymous.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn’t very good-looking. But in his own way he’d always save the day.

I loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. When I was five years old, I was already wearing a cowboy hat and suit. When I grew up, I knew John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas and so on.

Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.

Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

I remember I used to sleep on my records. In a room with no furniture. I remember I used to sleep in my car.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I’m not interested in. So, as far as I’m concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don’t know. When I know, I don’t care because I knew how it was.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

For ideas to prevail, many of their defenders have to die in obscurity. Their anonymous influence makes itself felt.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

There are so many memories for me in Manchester. Everywhere I go, I think, ‚I used to have boutiques here, clubs there, restaurants in that area.‘

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

The old Dodgers were something special, but of my teammates overall, there was nobody like Pee Wee Reese for me.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

I can’t remember what made my dad take us karting for the first time, I can’t remember really. I was into motorsport by then and I knew everything, and every driver, it was around 2009, 2008. That’s when I first properly knew about Formula One. Those were the days.

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman. I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

In my day, there were no vet video games.

I never listen to ‚Nevermind.‘ I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

I’m nobody, who are you?

I’m saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.

The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.

I’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films.

The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don’t meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it’s essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you’re going to be an actor.

It feels kinda weird being back in a high school cause I haven’t been in a high school for about a year. So um, it’s kinda interesting coming back, and y’know seeing the lockers, with all the signs, the handmade signs, so being in high school again is a little bit strange but in a good way.

I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

I used to really love Fiend, but he stopped. He just stopped. Every time he had a project, every project – ‚There’s One In Every Family,‘ ‚Street Life‘ – I had to have them. And he just stopped. And that was disappointing, ‚cause that was my favorite rapper at one time.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

In my heart, I’m just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I’m not a rich man.