I love being on my bike, but I don't consider that a sport: it's too pleasant.
If you want to know why the coast is such an inspirational place, ask Herman Melville, Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad. It's a glimpse of eternity. It invites rumination, the relentless whisper of the tide against the shore.
To make the hips the focal point of a pair of trousers is, to me, a fashion mistake.
Happiness is the target one only has to aim at in order to miss.
All the best musicians started out in church; Jesus invented rock 'n' roll.
If you don't like The Ramones, you don't like rock 'n'roll. They're like The Beach Boys without the sea.
Being unapologetic means never having to say you're sorry.
Where's the mileage in an autobiography? Anyone who writes one inevitably casts themselves as a hero, and I'm not about to do that.
I don't think 'Citizen Kane' stands more than one watch. Power corrupts. Who didn't know that?
The only casual item I own is a Levi's jacket.
Where I grew up, the one unmistakable sign of homosexuality was to betray some interest in your appearance.
At the beginning, there was no chance I'd get published so I thought I'd give it a go live. I had to perform in rock band places and working men's clubs, where you wouldn't expect to find poetry. I ploughed a lonely furrow.
My look was based on the Madison Avenue guy who's just lost his job. Ivy League suit a bit scuzzed up, an outgrown layer cut and five o'clock shadow.
You know how the Marvel Comics superheroes formed themselves into the Justice League of America - Batman, Flash and the rest. Why did Superman join? He never needed any help.
It took me 30 years for people to consider me an overnight success.
There've been lots of positive changes in the city since I worked at Salford Tech in the seventies, and I'm pleased to be known as Salford's Bard and to have helped put it on the map.
I've had a few jobs, but if you want to be a writer, you're better off getting a job that doesn't require that you do anything.
If there's a gene, I got it from my ma. Her writing has this effortless quality.
I got to play The Vortex in London with the Buzzcocks, the Fall, me and Johnny Thunders And The Heartbreakers. That was a serious Manchester night.
Idleness - a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything - is the poet's friend.
