Dave Gahan

“Making a record with 'Depeche Mode' is not a simple process. It's quite complicated and long. We have the luxury of time. I'm not sure that's such a good thing when you're being creative.”

“To me, it's always been a challenge to look for the light: to look for those spaces in your heart where there is hope and faith and try to embrace that rather than crush it. I've spent so many years trying to crush those feelings of hope, and I certainly succeeded for quite a while.”

“I still hold on to the idea that a record can really change the way I feel.”

“I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.”

“In the early to mid-'90s, everywhere I turned, someone had died. It wasn't just people in bands. It was the people I was hanging out with. At some point, I thought, 'I may be heading down that road.'”

“It takes a long time to find your own voice. Along the way, you imitate all the things that influence you - in my case Johnny Cash, Bowie, John Lydon.”

“Depeche Mode have never got over their teenage awkwardness with each other. We're still like that. Mates but not mates. That awkwardness is there, only now we have families and kids.”

“You're only going to get surface with me. It takes me ages to warm up to people.”

“I had a few brushes with death, where I nearly chose to go. The final one in 1996 did it for me. I suddenly had that feeling that I wasn't indestructible. There was no big white light experience, I just felt this complete blackness and a huge voice inside me saying, 'This is not right.'”

“I definitely have a dark side of me that can be pretty vicious... as we all do.”

“Like every New Yorker, I have a love/hate relationship with the city. There are times it's overbearing, but when I'm away even for a little while, I can't wait to get home. I am a New Yorker.”

“When I was growing up in the early '70s and really getting into music, waiting outside the record store for that 45, waiting for a single from The Dead, The Clash, David Bowie, or T-Rex or something to be there. There was something about that that was so special.”

“The whole 'serious artist' thing is very damaging. The powers that be will steer you towards your own demise. One thing I've learned is that it's not very glamourous, and my problems are no different from anybody else's.”

“I always played around with writing songs, but when you're spending a lot of time in bars, you have a lot of big ideas, but you don't do much with them.”

“There's that side of me that wants to be the loving, caring father, and there's the other side of me that's just a dirty animal. If I don't let that out, I go nuts.”

“I do use texting as a great way to communicate quickly, but I don't Twitter or anything.”

“I go to see some big shows of other bands, and I feel like I'm so bombarded and over-stimulated that I lose interest in the music. There has to be light and shade, and less stimulating moments. There has to be an arc to the show.”

“I think there's a great strength in having the courage and also having the support to do what you want to do when you're an artist in any way, shape or form.”

“You've got to put interesting people around you; you've got to work with people who are gonna inspire you to take the songs you've written into a completely different direction, because there's nothing more boring than going to the studio and predictably knowing what is going to happen.”

“'Presence of God' is really that understanding that sometimes when you step out of your own shoes and just open your ears and listen to what's going on around you, you get answers to the questions you were asking.”