""He was firstly an artist and secondly a musician. If ever he was asked what he did, the reaction would always be 'I'm an artist', never 'I'm a musician.' *"

"If you had said to a young Syd, ‘Look, this is your bargain in life, you know, you’re going to do this fantastic stuff, but it won’t be forever, it’ll be this short period. There’s the dotted line, are you going to sign for this?’ I suspect, maybe, a lot of people would sign for that, for making their mark."

"Well, he's schizophrenic. And has been since 1968."

"It's sad that these people think he's such a wonderful subject, that he's a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad man who can't deal with life or himself. He's got uncontrollable things in him that he can't deal with and people think it's a marvellous, wonderful, romantic thing. It's just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who's just disintegrated."

"Syd was so beautiful with his violet eyes. I only sort of lay beside him, nothing more could be accomplished. Then he had a breakdown and was gone. He hardly spoke. He would just tolerate me because I was so overpowered, so in awe that I didn't really speak either. I only hung around him for two or three weeks just before he flipped and was virtually removed from the group. I knew Syd was wonderful because he wrote such wonderful songs. He didn't have to speak because the fact that he couldn't speak made him who he was: this person who wrote these mysterious songs. I just liked looking at him: he was very pretty. A lot of the time with pop stars, when they open their mouths, it was all completely ruined anyway. So it was perfect that he was like that. My first pop star and it was just wonderful that he didn't speak."

"Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people, I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that would've been tricked--maybe they were working their entry into an art school."

"We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They'll have to offer a well-presented theatre show."

"Well, I've got a colour telly, and a fridge. I've got some pork chops in the fridge, but the chops keep going off, so I have to keep buying more."

"That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way."

"Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter…I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done…But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger."

"We all wear some disguise — make some professions — use some artifice to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom, though we may endeavour to keep some others that we think less to our credit as much as possible in the background…"

"Indeed some degree of affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all."

"But there is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body."

"Gallantry to women (the sure road to their favor) is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it."

"Horus non numero nisi serenas—"I count only the hours that are serene"—is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled."

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it."

"If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

"To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead."

"Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them."

"A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them."

"We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again."

"We are not hypocrites in our sleep."

"The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public."

"Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it."

"So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything."

"Good temper is an estate for life…"

"The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favour."

"Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy."

"To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it…"

"Zeal will do more than knowledge."

"He who comes up to his own idea of greatness, must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind."

"Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks."

"No really great man ever thought himself so."

"Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use."

"We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."

"If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago."

"For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about."

"The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet."

"The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have."

"One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed."

"This Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious."

"To be remembered after we are dead, is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living."

"Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel."

"Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them."

"Those who can command themselves, command others."

"The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts."

"He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies."

"Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity, who drink of that flood of glory as of a river, and refresh our wings in it for future flight."

"Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men."

"An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may."