James Blunt

“It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.”

“I try to read everything that I can about myself because Saddam Hussein didn't read his reviews and he thought he was winning!”

“We are in the entertainment business. This should be fun. We are musicians; we don't save lives. We shouldn't... we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously or be revered that much.”

“School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.”

“My mum was very good at making me take up musical instruments, so although there was no popular music she made me learn the recorder when I was three, the violin when I was five and the piano when I was seven. I took up the guitar myself when I was 14.”

“Things take a long time, but when it's right things move fast.”

“Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.”

“Carrie Fisher was the most remarkable person I've ever known. I made my first three albums in her house. 'Goodbye My Lover' was recorded in her bathroom. My life will not be nearly as much fun now she's gone.”

“My guitar survived Kosovo, then I went to visit a record company back in London and fell off my motorbike with it on my back, smashing it to bits. I was travelling at two miles per hour.”

“War is devastating, and it leaves its scars for generations.”

“In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'”

“The weird thing about the subway is no one looks at each other. So I play the O2 in London. It's a 20,000 capacity venue, and then I'll take the subway to my gig, and everyone's going to my gig, and no one looks at you. If anyone does, they say, 'Hey, you look exactly like James Blunt, only smaller.'”

“I don't think I picked up the guitar in the first place as a way of getting women. There are probably better ways of doing it.”

“The showbiz world has to be manipulated to make it more interesting because most people's lives are boring.”

“I know I'm a pop star. But sometime I'd like to be a rock star.”

“I think sensitive is the wrong description of me. I'm British, actually, so quite bad at expressing myself in conversation, as any ex-girlfriend will tell you. I'm probably emotionally stunted.”

“I love hamburgers, but if you give me a hamburger for every meal, I'm gonna tire of it.”

“Like any parents, mine wanted me to have a secure job with a regular wage and career prospects. And the one job my father knew of, that he'd had experience of himself, was the army, so he could help me in that direction.”

“I stopped doing interviews for a long time because the words were mine, but they were in the wrong order. Context is a very important thing - a lot of the things I say aren't serious, and so to remove the laughter does me no favours.”

“Touring is the best invention of all time, so if I have to suffer a little bit of payback for having all this fun, then so be it.”