It wasn't like I was specifically wanting to write songs about technology. It's just what I lived, what I was experiencing growing up.

It's crazy that people are looking to me as a symbol like, 'Oh, he's the voice of the youth. He's this and this and that.' I feel like there's a lot of pressure that comes with it, when people look to you as the face of something.

It's my job to accept my youth, to spread my story, to let people know who I am as an individual, because there's so many people who are blinded and think less of me because of my skin color.

We were told not to turn our hobby into our job, but to turn our job into our hobby. As kids, we were told not to pursue our dreams!

Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.

I spent years only ever reading horror and then trying to write horror - and deep down, a horror writer is still what I'd love to be. But it wasn't until I started writing crime that things began to work for me.

When I was young, I wanted, most of all, to be a writer of films and film music. But Middlesbrough in 1968 wasn't the place to be if you wanted to do movie scores.