A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception.
I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.
I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.
It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.
Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.
I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!
I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.
My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.
I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.
You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.
Singing is my profession - there is no plan B.
I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.
I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.
I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.
Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.
I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.
I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.
I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.
The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
Hearing the blues changed my life.
You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.
I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.
You've got to separate the singer and the songs.
I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.
