Quotes from Steven Wilson

The real artists are ultimately people who don't consider their audience and are almost incapable of considering their audience. They can do what they do and fire themselves up.

My autobiography would be 'Loves music, loves art, works hard, writes music, tours the world, makes records.'

There are certain topics that I've come back to time and again throughout my career. On 'To the Bone,' there are certain subjects I have touched on before.

When you're in a band, you're all in it together. You're always available. You're always available for the albums; you're always available for the tours. There's no question of that.

Being English, we're polite and reserved, we don't express our opinions; we're very private people.

I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.

I never made a distinction, really, between music and sound. Let me explain what I mean by that. I grew up near to a train station, and the sound of the trains became a very important part of my world. It was a very musical sound to me.

The one thing I do believe is, if you make the songs about the human aspects of things, you've got a much better chance of having the music transcend the times. If you make them very political and very topical, it's going to date very quickly.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.

That's what made me fall in love with music in the first place was the idea of being able to take listeners on a journey across forty or sixty minutes.

When I was a very young kid, the first music that really turned me on was a new wave of British heavy metal - big, dumb rock music. There was a band called Diamond Head - they were basically the band that inspired Metallica. But I also liked bands like Saxon and Iron Maiden.

Certainly for some time, people used to think of my solo career as somehow a side project to Porcupine Tree. No. If anything, the opposite would now have to be the case.

I wanted people to say that our music sounds like Porcupine Tree, not that it sounds like King Crimson.

Porcupine Tree is a band, and it's not up to me where the band goes - it's between the manager, our agent, and the band as a whole.

I've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.

People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.

One of the beauties about going solo was being able to start from scratch and say, 'What do I really want? What kind of band do I really want? What kind of live show do I really want to stage?' Without any of the baggage of being something with history.

When it comes to being in a band or going solo, one is collaborative, and one is not. But generally speaking, when going solo, I am the boss. People can contribute ideas, but I am the boss. When collaborating, you make compromises and look for a common ground.

Ultimately, I don't think you can be a character who's completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It's probably true of every writer - it's probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter - that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.

You cannot please everyone, and I think that what's important, ultimately, is to make sure you please yourself. If you start trying to please other people, you'll just go around in circles.

There's always something special playing in your home country in front of your home audience.

I've played to audiences where people are sitting there with their arms crossed, just kind of watching. Although they might be having a great time, and they might be really enjoying the spectacle, if I'm not getting anything back, it does affect the way I perform and project.

I myself lived in London for 20 years, and I never knew my next-door neighbors. I never knew what they did. I never knew their names. They didn't know what I did for a living, and they didn't know my name.

I think there is something about the Internet which gives people almost an opportunity to role play and to create a facade, an image. I see that as quite a dangerous development because I think what we call social networking, Twitter, Facebook, etc., is actually quite antisocial.