I've been asked over the years to compile a list of desert-island discs. I couldn't do that. If I was trapped on a desert island, I don't think I'd want 10 songs to bring with me.
There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel united with them would be the sense of us having grown up in isolation.
Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.
Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.
The road is a nasty place and lonely.
If I'd been born into a hearing family and went to a public school, I would have probably felt much more isolated, and being deaf would have become my identity.
I've been so lonely for long periods of my life that if a rat walked in I would have welcomed it.
People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.
Well, you don't get to do things that other children get to do, having friends and slumber parties and buddies. There were none of that for me. I didn't have friends when I was little. My brothers were my friends.
I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.
Oh, I do get lonely, yes.
I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
I don't really have friends in general. I never have. I didn't go to college and didn't have friends in high school.
Writing is a lonely process.
I miss going to school and having friends; that's normal for anyone my age. I had a very boring childhood because I never had the opportunity to associate with anybody my own age due to my career. I miss being around kids my own age.
The most solitary I ever felt was when I was living in New York. I used to live in Enrico Caruso's old apartment, and I had a special staircase that took me up to the roof. There was nobody up there.
Modeling is a lonely business.
The experience of pregnancy - it depends on your situation, but it can be quite isolating.
I am plenty lonely in hotel rooms.
People treating you differently, when you don't feel any different, is really alienating.
I discovered that it was a lonely world being a solo artist. Then I started working with another solo artist, Rod Stewart, and he used to tell me how lonely he was!
With modelling, you go somewhere for 24 hours and you don't even see the city, you don't talk to people or see the culture.
Touring gets really lonely.
I want to spend the night alone in a haunted mansion. I wouldn't say I'm sceptical because that word implies the truth is out there when there is no truth out there.
In '98, I locked myself in my house, went out of my mind and wrote 25 songs. I rarely bathed during that period of writing, I sent out for food, I didn't really venture out of my house in three or four months. It was a hell of an experience.
