At some point you start seeing the difference between what you really want, and what is your priority order. I feel that today I know what I want. That's the problem with perspective, as well as focus and concentration.

Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.

I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

I've watched 'Oprah Winfrey.' And I'm proud. I don't care what anybody says! I don't know whether I've watched it. I've been in the room while it's been on.

I don't feel I'm thrown around by the winds of taste and fashion.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

As Australians, we see the law as inherently bad. We have a real inherent distaste for authority in our makeup.

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.

I have a particular dislike for children's films. I'm way past the novelty aspect.

You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.

I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.

My records are basically a litany of complaints against the world, and I'm quite like that in real life as well.

To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don't read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.

I love rock-n-roll. I think it's an exciting art form. It's revolutionary. Still revolutionary and it changed people. It changed their hearts. But yeah, even rock-n-roll has a lot of rubbish, really bad music.

It's always a pleasure on a personal note for me to come back to Australia.

When I'm singing 'Deanna,' for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.

The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike.

Most of my ideals and stuff really come from my mother.

No, I wouldn't direct a movie, no. I couldn't. I don't have the patience for it, I don't have the people skills. You have to be clever. I'm not really clever in that kind of way. And you have to be able to manipulate people, but at the same time allow them to feel like they are manipulating you, to get the kind of movie that you want.

I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.

Look, when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say.

I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.

There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.