"If you want to think about Roxy Music as a real force, you have to really understand just how unusual it was for a band to be as self-referential in the early 70s. Pop music had never done that before. It wasn't taking references from the 50s and the 60s and pulling them apart, or taking high fashion and lampooning it, and being - in quotes - 'ironic'. We are so used to everybody grabbing their influences from 60 years of pop culture nowadays that it is no big deal. Back then, when Roxy Music first came out it was like trying to get your head around a human collage. I was a teenager and didn't really understand that nuance, but I knew that something was happening and that it was very clever. But, that all doesn't really mean very much unless the songs sound great and Roxy's records sounded really great. I am glad that bands had such a strong concept around the business of making singles and Roxy Music took it very seriously. It shows how great a single can be in that you can take all of that conceptual stuff and try and cram it into a three-and-a-half minute song. That is an amazing thing. That's why I picked the collection of singles. The Roxy albums are great in their own right, but when you have everything that was going on with Roxy Music in a collection of sharp singles, all next to each other on an album, I will go with that album every time. I try to make all my solo albums sound like greatest hits albums. Roxy Music managed to be slightly weird and not obvious, but really entertaining and intriguing and catchy at the same time. That is a very, very powerful combination."

"The story, the acting was sublime. [Director] Mike Nichols did an incredible job. He just did such an amazing job. The story of the old woman and the young student was so new — we had never seen that onscreen, a depiction of that. Once again, I thought this was just a brilliant character study of these people. The story was extraordinary. I loved the relationship with Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. I just thought that was staggering. And Dustin Hoffman’s performance was so sweet, and he was so insecure and a mumbling fool in so many ways. And she was so seductive. You know, she was a counselor at my camp? She was a drama counselor. When I was nine, she was 17 or 18, and she came to the camp and I was the only one who really took to her of all my camp friends. She would have me lie on the ground and we’d be in this bunk — like in a rehearsal hall or something — she would have us lie on the floor and picture the sky and picture all the different things that could come from the sky [laughing]. She just inspired me. Then I watched her on The Goldbergs — not the new Goldbergs — but The Goldbergs with Molly Goldberg, the brilliant, brilliant television show in the 1950s. Then I saw her in The Graduate — I was a young woman — and I was just — oh my God, she was so beautiful. And I couldn’t believe I had known her. She inspired me to act, she really did. As did Francis Coppola. I went to college with him — Hofstra University. He was the person who wrote all the plays. He wrote the shows — all the original shows that I was the star of. I’d be hired to do all the shows that he had written and his uncle would write the music, so it was kind of great."

"She's one of my all-time favourite artists, all-time favourite spirits and one of my all-time favourite voices. I think she's incredibly fragile and I continue to worry for her because I don't think she's being very well taken care of as an artist. There's certain artists need everybody's help to continue to be creative and she's one of them. 

 I'm a tank – I can take care of myself and I don't need anybody's help, but Sinéad O'Connor is a jewel and has a voice like no other – one of the great voices of this century. I worry that we're going to lose her. She has mental health problems and has spoken very openly about them and is really brave and courageous for doing so. She's a great rebellious spirit who was punished for being a rebel in ways that we can barely imagine or conceive of. I have nothing but great admiration for her. 

 She has this extraordinary voice that just does things to my insides. She's a complete iconic gem and touches me in ways that so few can; she's made so many beautiful records. I wish I could sort of throw myself at her feet, because I feel like she finds love, I think, difficult to absorb, and yet she's so deserving of it. This voice comes, again, from a different universe. Its spectacular ability to both emote and communicate. I'm so grateful to her for this record; I just love it and I love hearing her sing so much. She's one of my touchstones, someone I always can rely on to bring magic. 
 When greats die, like when David Bowie died, there's this great outpouring of grief as I know there will be if and when, god forbid, we lose, finally, an artist like Sinéad O'Connor. Yet she's alive now and is capable of producing these spectacular pieces of work, and yet she's treated so brutally by the music industry – an industry who would rather laude in applause an uncreative, stage-schooled kid who's got a great voice but no soul. They'll get more excited about that than they will the possibility of signing a great like Sinéad O'Connor. And therein lies the ludicrousness of the modern music business."

"I was at my son's house in Henley, we were having dinner. Mark likes to play me things that he knows I'll like. So he didn't say anything, he just put it on. We were having dinner, and I hear ‘Am I Wrong' and I said, 'Who the hell is that?' He said, 'Who?' I said, 'What you're playing there!' 'Oh, a guy called Keb' Mo'.' So I said, 'Turn it up!' It's tremendous. [sings ‘Am I Wrong'] You just think, Jesus! Something that I haven't heard before, that first initial thing, is always the most exciting to me. I've heard him do other things since, but that, ‘Am I Wrong'... great. When I've listened to him singing, there's a similarity in our vocal tone and syncopation. When I was playing it in my house, funnily enough, back in LA - I play guitar, nowhere near as good as he does, but a few chords - so I'm playing it downstairs and my wife was up in the bedroom, and I said 'did you hear that thing I was playing?' She said 'you got your guitar out, right? It was you?' I said 'it's not me'. She said 'I heard you get your guitar out and start singing', I said 'no, it's not, it's a guy called Keb' Mo''. And she thought that it was me, and I thought, 'wow, that's great, that she thinks I can play as well as him'."