No matter what you do, if you're trying to create something new, your environment has a massive impact on you.

Although they might not admit it, I think girls are very aware of the impact that they're having. But they never feel it themselves, and it's impossible to explain. It's like trying to tell a blind person what yellow is.

I really want it to have an impact on the world. I want to be in a town on the other side of the world, and somebody walks up and says, 'That music you made in Glasgow, I listened to it every day, and it moved me.'

Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.

Music lives in cycles. One day, one type of music is on top and the next year another genre is on top. Either the fans love you or they jump from one artist to another.

People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.