If you go on challenging life, saying ‘Why won’t life do something for me? Why am I the one who’s always losing?,’ then all you’re doing is perpetuating life as is, the idea that life revolves around you as the center of the universe, which is not true. It’s not realistic and it’s not practical. You’re just another fucking cog in the wheel and you’re nothing. You only mean something when you believe yourself to be nothing. ‘If you want nothing then you’ve got everything.’
Interview in Trouser Press, July 1980
Illustration by Alan Aldridge: Cry Baby Cry, from The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969)
