Quotes

I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.

[on why he left Pink Floyd in 1985] I knew that we were over with, as far as the traditional 'band of brothers' notion of a rock group goes. I mean, we just weren't like that any more and we were never going to be like that again.

You take the risk of being rejected. If you have pretentions to be an artist of any kind, you have to take the risk of people rejecting you and thinking you're an arsehole.

When I first got a guitar, it was a Spanish, classical thing. I took a few lessons from a woman in Cambridge who used to keep her guitar in her bed, as if it was a sexual thing.

The loss of a father is the central prop upon which (The Wall) stands. As the years go by, children lose their fathers again and again, for nothing. You see it now with all of these fathers, good men and true, who lost their lives and limbs in Iraq for no reason at all. I've done Bring the Boys Back Home in my encores on recent tours. It feels more relevant and poignant to be singing that song now than it did in 1979.

[on the Falklands War in 1982, the inspiration for Pink Floyd's album The Final Cut] My view is certainly that it saved Margaret Thatcher's political career at the time at the cost of a great many Argentine and British lives, which disgusted me then and still does now. But I was never a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher and her policies.

[in 1990] I find the ubiquitous nature of Phil Collins's presence in my life irritating.

The situation in Israel/Palestine, with the occupation, the ethnic cleansing and the systematic racist apartheid Israeli regime is unacceptable.

I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years. My industry has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice against Israel. There's me and Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Manic Street Preachers, one or two others, but there's nobody in the US where I live. I've talked to a lot of them, and they are scared shitless.

I like my rock'n'roll to be very direct. I don't want to be digging around trying to figure out the meaning.

[on Joe Biden] President Biden? Well, he's fueling the fire in Ukraine, for a start - that is a huge crime.

Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him, in his... whatever that state that he was in his whole life. We'll never know, we didn't, you know? Although he was all over the TV for hundreds of years with his idiocy and nonsense. I don't care about Black Sabbath, I never did. I have no interest in biting the heads off chickens or whatever they do. I couldn't care less, you know.

[in 2026] England is now a fascist state, witness the criminalizing of Palestine Action.