“If Michael Jackson could write a song for a rat, I could write a song for [my pet bulldog] Noelle.”

“I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point? (The Hit magazine 1985)”

“I write music with my mouth — first lyrics, then song, then rhythm.”

“To me, song writing is so therapeutic, it's just part of my life and I can't go through the day without having some kind of song idea pop into my head where I have to write Sharpie all over my arm trying to remember the song idea.”

“Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records. So, when I left Pink Floyd, I guess I had two, no three choices open to me: Not to do it anymore, which is daft as I was writing songs, although I suppose I could have written for other people, but I like making records; so I could either do it as Roger Waters or I could have got together with other people and said hey, why don't we start a band? But my view of bands had been jaundiced slightly by my previous experience, so I think that was something I never considered.”

“I didn’t write that song to try and win you over, or to steal you away from him. I wrote it because I knew I never could.”

“I had his poster on my wall. He had me moonwalking around my bedroom. I'd love to have written any Michael Jackson song, so maybe start with one of the greatest.”

“Once I dreamed I'd write songs.”

“What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain’t a genre that somebody didn’t record them in. I’m not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don’t think I’ve done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia.”

“Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.”