My career has been wacky and not at all normal. I've never had a manager, nobody gets jobs for me. I wind up working with artists that I meet.

My life was really interesting before 'Chic.'

Nobody under the sun was like Madonna. She was positive and clear and wholly dedicated to achieving everything that she's achieved.

There's never been a song that I just wrote and tried to send to an artist.

When people tell you you're on the brink of death, you've got to dig pretty deep to get it together.

You can fool a person into going to see a movie with a good trailer.

Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.

Every record I have done was because I was a person's friend. The only time we did not continue to be friends was if the record did not become a hit. If it did, we became great friends.

Everything about my life was culturally rich, and all the people I met sort of reinforced the wackiness that was normally inside of me. No one said, 'You can't do that,' until I got to real record companies, that is.

I called all adults by their first names, and my mum was just another adult. I was the firstborn of my generation in the family, but because I was so close to my parents in age, they treated me with a kind of adult respect. They talked to me as an equal.

I grew up in the era of the concept album. What I do now is pick up on singles, and they are their own complete stories; you don't necessarily have to hear the rest of the album because I don't think albums are created like that anymore. They get songs from all over the place.

I love Madonna! If you want to see the Madonna I know, just go on YouTube and you'll see those early interviews before the record came out. She was giddy and wonderful and giggly and happy and so excited looking towards the future.

I used to play flute and clarinet at school, and although I wasn't thinking about making a living or getting a pay cheque, I already knew I was going to play music all my life.

I was a fan of the Marx Brothers. One of them had this character where he pretended not to be able to talk, but then he wrote this autobiography called 'Harpo Speaks!' He wrote about how he quit school at nine years old to become a professional.

I'd probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they're somewhat biographical - they're fiction but also non-fiction.

I've never cancelled any public appearance, simply because that's what my life is; it's doing my work, and I never want to stop doing my work unless it becomes impossible for me to do it.

My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn't really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor.

My responsibility is to the artist first. There's something that artists intrinsically know about their music and their fanbase that neither the record company nor the producer really knows.

The only person I have regrets about is Miles Davis. He and I had become good friends after we did a photo shoot, and coincidentally, we kept running into each other at parties and stuff. I regret not having written a hit for Miles Davis.

There's been this strange irony to my whole life. All my original bandmates have died, when I was the most wild and most reckless of us all. But I'm still here.