Robert Smith

“For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.”

“A lot of journalists give me a hard time about how I look, but I've never met a journalist I'd rather look like.”

“I had every intention of 'Bloodflowers' being the last Cure record. I thought it would be fantastic to finish with the best thing we'd ever done, but I wasn't sure we could pull it off.”

“You don't always have to sing dark things to be thoughtful.”

“I would be more familiar with Janet Jackson than I was with the Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, because I didn't want to listen to my competitors for fear of nicking ideas off them.”

“I always place myself as the archetypal Cure fan. I'm the wrong age, but I still think that if I like anything particularly, our fans will.”

“I hardly ever listen to any of our old stuff now. Once the songs have been recorded and put on to vinyl they become someone else's entertainment, not mine.”

“I had no desire to be famous; I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.”

“Whenever I'm home, I haven't got any makeup on. But even in the studio, before I do vocals, I put makeup on.”

“I've got a presence on all the social networks, in fact, but I've never once sent a message. I'm there because otherwise, someone's going to pretend to be me.”

“They may not like us, but they can't get away from knowing who we are.”

“When you're in a young band for the first time, geographically you're in the same place and you tend to go out and socialize. You play more shows, you spend more time together. You're a unit. As you grow older, inevitably you develop a life outside the band. I think it would be tragic if you didn't.”

“I think, at heart, unless you discover faith in something else, something other, it's very hard to shake the thing that you're adrift alone.”

“I don't care where the Cure is placed in the pantheon of rock. I don't care if we're perceived as relevant. We're never worried how we fit in. I don't even want to fit in.”

“Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free, and when you're nine or 10, your life is entirely dominated by adults. So he represented this thing that I wanted to be. Hendrix was the first person who made me think it might be good to be a singer and a guitarist - before that I wanted to be a footballer.”

“I'm not really obsessed with death.”

“I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.”

“I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point?”

“It's only people that aren't goths that think the Cure are a goth band.”

“I'd rather spend my time looking at the sky than listening to Whitney Houston.”