Quotes from John Lydon

I liked him as a bloke, and I like a lot of their songs. I like "Girls On Film," and I can't pretend otherwise. I don't have hatred for different forms of music, in fact I've got a great deal of love and openness to everything done by anybody. Christ, I have to: I've got two Alvin Stardust albums.

Simon Le Bon spotted me having a problem there, and he went, 'Don't you know who he is?' and that was it, I was in. I thought, 'Bloody hell, it takes Duran Duran to get Johnny Rotten into a building!' I liked him as a bloke, and I like a lot of their songs. I like 'Girls On Film', and I can't pretend otherwise.

But I don't call it immigration, I call it migration. As a species it's very healthy for us to get up and move around the planet. Sometimes certain groups of people have to do that for economic reasons. Nobody's doing it just to be spiteful. Everybody loves the idea of a homeland. I used to, but I've kind of got the bigger picture now. It's a home planet to me.

I never felt Irish. I always felt, 'I'm English, this is where I come from, and that's that.' Because you'd be reminded of that when you went to Ireland: 'Ye're not Oirish!' the locals would say. So it was like, 'Bloody hell, shot by both sides here.' I still love that Magazine song – so relevant to me, those lyrics.

Ich sag's ihnen in's gesicht.

Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – 'Anarchy In The UK' and 'God Save The Queen' – really hit their target. I'd like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that's where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn't just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.

You've got to learn in life, you've got to learn it quick and keep it for the rest of your life: pull your own strings, and have no puppetmaster – and – habits – are – puppetmasters.

And then you've got a media ready to package that, because it takes away from the political content of them songs. Suddenly there's not a real serious social message, there's just a drug addict. I

Many of the locals weren't too happy with Irish immigrants full stop, but they certainly weren't happy with a Catholic school, attached to a church, in the middle of these working-class council flats. They viewed that very much, I suppose, as people view a mosque today, as an alien agenda, and considered you an outsider for having anything to do with it.

Football's the kind of game where, if your team's doing really badly, it gets you into the mode of having a laugh at losing. You can actually enjoy looking forward to the next tragic defeat. And there's nothing else that gives me that ability. It serves an absolutely brilliant, beautiful purpose. It's the theater of emotions, not dreams.

Love 'em. Kool & the Gang, love 'em. What more can I say?

These were early days for me in the American culture, and so I wasn't aware that when people are showing you guns, they're not threatening you, it's like they're showing you their art collection. For me, at that point, what he was presenting to me was very challenging.

Dummy Dum Dum was my nickname for years at school. I was the strange one of the family, the one who couldn't remember his name.

Meat isn't murder, it's delicious.

Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it.