Robert Smith

I'd rather spend my time looking at the sky than listening to Whitney Houston.

When you're in a young band for the first time, geographically you're in the same place and you tend to go out and socialize. You play more shows, you spend more time together. You're a unit. As you grow older, inevitably you develop a life outside the band. I think it would be tragic if you didn't.

You know, the Internets made us more aware of what people think about us.

Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.

I don't find the technology threatening. A lot of people my age, my generation, find it difficult to immerse themselves. But I would never preclude the idea of using any technology if I thought it suited the end result.

Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.

I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.

I'm not really obsessed with death.

I don't think of death in a romantic way anymore.

If I put a value on my music, and no one's prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan; it can't work.

My whole life I've played music for my own personal enjoyment and the idea of it becoming a machine or a business is just horrible.