I prefer it when I can intimidate the audience rather than the audience intimidate me. I've been lucky in my career to have both.

Once you made that decision to split New Order up, you were like, 'Woo-hoo! I better get out there and get a job.'

I think people expect mud at festivals, I think you'd be asking for your money back if you didn't get it.

In the late '70s, the conditions that bands had to endure were, shall we say, not as civilized as they are today. People were a lot more aggressive back then. So there was definitely a lot of suffering for your art. But I would argue that was a good thing. Generally, people make better music when they suffer.

People come to me with their passion about transportation, about education, about health care, about agriculture, the dairy industry, the almond growers. I'm just a kid in a candy store, learning and eating up all this different knowledge.

I stupidly ignored education completely. I found it dull and I preferred to cause chaos and have fun. I regret this massively now.

My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.