Roy Harper

“I've taken a stand against religion for as long I've been able to write and think.”

“When I was 15, I was wearing sandals and corduroys, Guernsey, striped pullover, a beard that was hardly there, shades and a beret, and the goal was hanging out.”

“Don't shift because fashion has shifted. Don't move from the original ethic you had, the original reasons. They're part and parcel of you.”

“I'm careful, controlled, bodily conservative: if someone offered me a pill I'd only ever take a half.”

“I'd just like to prove to myself that I'm all here and all together and can get the best out of myself. I'd also like to prove that to a couple of other people.”

“What is our destiny? Does it matter? Is it bound up with 'our' planet? In my opinion, yes.”

“I was determined if I was going to become a superstar it would be on my terms. I've had that ethic since the beginning.”

“In some ways, I lament the introduction of civilisation on such a huge scale, because it has given us a lot of room to abuse each other, which we continue to do.”

“It's fantastic to put your hands in the earth. I enjoy spending my time in heaven here. I don't care what you say, this is my heaven.”

“I've seen such things as you would not believe. I've seen motorbikes driven down hotel corridors - and had a go myself.”

“I wanted to modernize music, but more than that, to completely modernize people's attitudes towards life in general.”

“I'm attending to my legacy, making sure that it travels the universe in the best shape I can get it into. For as long as I'm alive, I'll still be its interpreter.”

“I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.”

“If humanity was still in the feral state, we wouldn't have any need for these huge conurbations that we have now, that have turned us into a different bunch all together. In the feral state we would be much more secure, much more familiar with each other, much more mentally well-balanced.”

“In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.”

“At school, I was always daydreaming and fiddling in inkwells, but I had to learn to grow up and become articulate. And doing that was what brought me into writing songs. It's like therapy for me, because it exposes what I'm really thinking.”

“Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.”

“I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.”

“As soon as I heard skiffle, I loved it and I knew that I wanted to play it.”

“Remember, this was a world that was still ethnically separated. I was thirteen and ignorant of the social situation in America, but I felt these records were better than what my own culture was turning out.”