Coming from art school, I had a great sense of style - as did The Beatles and the Stones - and I enjoyed projecting that. Image, attitude, great music and great lyrics - that was the '60s.

In my time, we didn't know songs could last. All we ever thought of was next Tuesday. You never imagined a future.

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.

Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it.

People think that athletes have it great, and we do in a lot of regard, but universities make a hell of a lot of money off of players. You don't get a free education: you work full-time year round for five years for an education you could pay for three times over if you just got your market value.

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

Your chemistry high school teacher lied to you when they told you that there was such a thing as a vacuum, that you could take space and move every particle out of it.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.