"All you slingers and fiends hide behind your rocks put down your guard I'm not here to box this is no showdown so throw down your gun you see it doesn't matter where you come from."

"I'm the bloodstain On your shirt sleeve Coming down and more are coming to believe Now we know it all for sure."

"How long, How long? Will I slide? Separate my side? I don't believe it's bad Slit my throat it's all I ever had"

"Under the bridge downtown Is where I drew some blood Under the bridge downtown I could not get enough Under the bridge downtown Forgot about my love Under the bridge downtown I gave my life away"

"Bob Marley poet and a prophet Bob Marley taught me how to off it Bob Marley walkin' like he talk it Goodness me Can't you see I'm gonna cough it."

"My tendency for dependency Is offending me It's upending me I'm pretending see To be strong and free"

"First born unicorn Hardcore soft porn"

"Desecration is the smile on my face."

"Anthony's made a kind-of progress spiritually and inwardly, that you just don't see with rock-stars nowadays. He's gotten so much better as a singer, as a lyricist and as a human being."

"Arctic Monkeys are a great band, but bands like that sometimes spend a lot of time reminding people about the shitiness of reality. I don’t want to sing for half an hour, reminding people about how shit Sheffield is — unless it’s for one verse or a joke."

"I love dressing up. I’m from a huge African family and grew up in a really colorful place. The way I dress reflects my environment and wanting to take people into a fantasy world for half an hour."

"It's quite spiky, quite dramatic, theatrical rock 'n' roll really."

"I love the intimacy of small venues, I really do, I like that look that people have that they feel like they're special and they can hear and they can see the band as well."

"I think of the Ramones when I think of music that can save your life, but I’m not so sure about a band like Fall Out Boy who appears to make music in vein or that, at least, doesn’t sound like something they would die for."

"We're just going to play the hell out of it until they can't take it anymore."

"When someone like Kurt Cobain or Jack White comes out, they didn’t go, “He sounds just like Muddy Waters,” did they? They just said, “He’s great, he sounds like him.” When women come out and men write about them, they tend to write about them in a way that other men can understand, which sometimes can seem a bit patronizing."

"We are able to speak for ourselves through our music rather than being defined and put into the spotlight in a very male kind of groomed way for an obviously predominantly male audience."

"I am angry with him but I have compassion for him. The reason I can have a relationship with him is that I don’t see him as my father but as an individual. I’m glad I didn’t murder him that day. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had."

"I like being on the margins. You work better there."

"Before 1999, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas offered to get me exhibitions, but joining the Stuckists put a kaibosh on all that — because I wasn't prepared to be controlled. I agreed to co-found the Stuckists to be allowed to say what I wanted, and I left the Stuckists because I didn't really want to be in them in the first place."

"Artists who don't paint aren't artists."

"It has become an ongoing national joke."

"Britain's greatest cultural asset"

"a seething, dyslexic, better-looking British Bukowski"

"Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!"

"Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don’t like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen."

"What, like Harpic?"

"When I was better known than her, she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother, but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do."

"I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh."

"Interviewer Barb H: Your sound is quite refreshing, did it come naturally? AP: As natural as the day you were born, my love."

"I still get laughed at but it doesn't bother me, I'm just so glad to hear laughter around me."

"you're rich in love you're great bed you'll see the world you'll knock 'em dead and all the thick books that you've read will count for nothing in the end"

"I'm not gonna live my life on one side of an ampersand."

"A turn, a screw, a pull, a twist, the drug that makes you prettiest."

"Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes."

"i am a herd of cats and a drunk shepherd with alzheimer’s all at once. i am the walrus."

"I really like Neil a whole, whole, whole lot, and I really do not want to marry Kevin Smith, even a little. Do you remember the Trojan War, dude? I’m just saying. Can you imagine what a world war between a Neil Gaiman army and a Kevin Smith army would actually look like? Their fans are serious. I predict there would be lots of very high-fallutin’, toilet-based name-calling, confusing many. And possibly foam swords swinging at hockey sticks. Actually, that’s bullshit. There’s no way anybody would leave their Twitter feeds for long enough to pull out a foam sword or a hockey stick. Maybe it’ll be the world’s first full-on digital war and people will just head over to Second Life to duke it out. I hope Neil’s army wins."

"Rock needs theater, rock is theater. We just go through different eras of guilty admission about this. Having risen with The Dresden Dolls in the heyday of The Strokes and The White Stripes, everyone was looking at us as completely misfit theater dorks. But it’s really encouraging to see a more theater-dork wave of bands like The Scissor Sisters, Antony & The Johnsons, CocoRosie, Patrick Wolf and even Arcade Fire and Decembrists becoming popular. The dress-up freaks are coming back, and it’s wonderful to watch."

"I'm bisexual, but it's not the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about … I've slept with girls; I've slept with guys, so I guess that's what they call it! I'm not anti trying to use language to simplify our lives."

"It makes me very sad when I find out that people who never hear our music think that we are really about image and not about substance. … I can understand why you might get that impression if you've never heard the band's music and see a photo of a guy and a girl dressed up in crazy costumes and think, "I don't need to pay attention to that — why do they need to wear those crazy clothes?" I think that's why we've constantly toured. Our live show is so intense and so substantive and emotional that it's sort of the price we have to pay for being so flamboyant — we have to prove ourselves as a rock band."

"I write a lot, but it's not all fantastic. There's plenty of terrible crap. We work on a few things at a time, let some things fall away, make changes. We certainly have enough for the next album, which could take at least another year to come out."

"I wanted them to see the gloriousness of the California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah desert. So every chance we got, we stopped the bus and just absorbed that dead heat beauty and that terrain."

"Would the king of punks be a cliché? Oh, no, vicar."

"The class system is there to remind you that you’re just a dirty oik because you came from that side of the tracks."

"Almost killed me, nothing to be laughed at. But oddly enough it’s something that made me. Without that, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today, so thank God I almost died. The pain I had to endure of losing my memory and forgetting who I was — that’s always still in me. I never explained it until the book, and the songs — what agony that was for me. My greatest sense of achievement was conquering that."

"I’ve not done any of this for superstardom, quite the opposite. I threw away the rock star mantle. And for that, there’s resentment too: ‘How dare he, how dare he.’"

"The only things I’ve ever confronted are institutions, religion, politics, but never my fellow human beings, and yet my fellow human beings find the need to defend those very things that are restricting their freedoms. God, that sounds like a speech. Should I run for president?"

"It’s a family house."

"Are you really going to hand over the White House to a real estate agent? [...] I want a wig just like that one."

"My favourite album by her is The Dreaming, and I think she produced that one herself. That got a lot of criticism — but I loved it. It was overloaded with textures, and tones and all manner of things. It’s a record that I still can play to this day, and still hear new things."