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.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

Whenever something went wrong when I was young – if I had a pimple or if my hair broke – my mom would say, ‚Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.‘ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.

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.

‚9 to 5,‘ that little song, that little story, just won’t ever end. Just like ‚I Will Always Love You,‘ it just keeps comin‘ back, popping up its head in one way or another.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

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.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

Even Gaddafi’s adversaries assure us that he stood out for his intelligence as a student; he was expelled from high-school for his anti-monarchic activities. He managed to enroll in another high-school and later graduated in law at the University of Benghazi at the age of 21.

Years and years ago, I did a game based on ‚Hitchhiker’s Guide‘ with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text.

I’ve always liked older ladies, ever since my mother would have B’nai B’rith at our house.

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.

‚The Story of Us‘ is about running into someone I had been in a relationship with at an awards show, and we were seated a few seats away from each other. I just wanted to say to him, ‚Is this killing you? Because it’s killing me.‘ But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t. Because we both had these silent shields up.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

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

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‚We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.‘

In high school, I majored in brick masonry. We had the wood shop, the machine shop, so I know about all that. I wanted to build buildings when I graduated from high school. I do know my way around that stuff.

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.

As supportive as my hometown is, in my high school, there are people who would probably walk up to me and punch me in the face. There’s a select few that will never like me. They don’t like what I stand for. They don’t like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy. They’re going to be negative no matter what.

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

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

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

The funny thing is, all my friends are short. I wasn’t aware of tall people till I got to high school. I didn’t know they existed. I was sheltered.

I just miss – I miss being anonymous.

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

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

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.

I look at other people’s lives, and some people feel like they’re too old to play with toys. But I still go through the toy section at the store, ‚cause there were toys that I wanted when I was little that I couldn’t have. So I still get them.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

I’m happy that I have my family, and I’m happy that I had Virginia, where I grew up, to retreat to any time I felt overwhelmed. Whenever there were times when I felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me and I was floating in this crazy space, I would stop and go back to that neighborhood and realize nothing’s changed, really.

A good song never gets old.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

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.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

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

I have this old ’57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I’ll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, ‚cluh-CLICK-click.‘ That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that’s what I’m into.

I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

I was adored once too.

Oh, 1994, April 27. There won’t be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.

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 really miss being able to blend in with people.

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

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.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

I had a rat-tail when I was younger. I had this nice Bobby Brown fade, with a rat-tail that was long enough to wrap around my face. I used to chew on the end and bite it.

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.

Since the departure of good old-fashioned entertainers the re-emergence of somebody who wants to be an entertainer has unfortunately become a synonym for camp. I don’t think I’m camper than any other person who felt at home on stage, and felt more at home on stage than he did offstage.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

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.

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.

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

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don’t sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.