Quotes from Ian Anderson

I'm very much an observer and a conduit of thoughts and ideas.

I kind of like the idea of living a rather ordinary life as a shopkeeper, and I examine that possibility as one of the outcomes of the young Gerald Bostock growing older.

In most cases, my favorite Jethro Tull songs will be determined by how I feel about them as live performance songs, not by the recorded identity.

I'm very motivated by the occasional creative payoff that comes when something goes really well, be it a song, a recording or performance. The payoff is enormous - when you get it. Most of the time, though, I'm filled with self-loathing and general frustration at the limitations I have as a musician.

If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim.

We do hear perhaps too many accolades generally aimed at people like Steve Jobs. We have to remember that there are other classic things in life that we undervalue and take them for granted. If you think of the classic lines of the modern jet aircraft, it's really been there since early World War II.

I'm not one for Sudoku or crosswords - the thing that fires my little brain is doing tour budgets.

Touring is what you make it. I like to organise as much as possible myself.

There seems to be an inclination among rock musicians to be very carefree with money, but I negotiate the best flight and hotel deals on our tours to maximise the band's income - I don't want too see too much taken off the top line.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

It was instilled in me that the money I was given was not to be lost or spent on any other purpose.

Most of what I've written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you're going through puberty.

The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players.

I was not a great guitarist, so I sold my 1960 Fender Stratocaster in exchange for a Shure Microphone, made in Chicago, and a flute.

Prog didn't really go away. Just took a catnap in the late Seventies. A new generation of fans discovered it, and a whole new array of bands and solo artists took it on into the new millennium.

I've always felt that some of my best lyrics are less than three minutes long, and it's great when you can do that - be succinct and get the message across in a simple, clear idea.

I'm all in favor of banks that play their part in community endeavors, private individuals looking for loans, people who want to start up a little business, and that's what banks are for.

'Aqualung' marks the point at which I had the confidence as a songwriter and as a guitar player to actually pick up and play the guitar and be at the forefront of the band. It's also the album on which I began to address religious issues in my music, and I think that happened simply because the time was right for it.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

I was always more interested in the ultimate live performance rather than the recording for its own sake. And, for the audience too, that thrill of - just being there.

I don't really set out to please anybody, and I don't think I ever have. I have occasionally been encouraged to try to write something specifically for the purpose of releasing it as a single to get radio play. Those are not my best songs, as a rule.

I feel the audience has a right to know if some of the money they're spending is going to a certain cause, and reassuring them the money is going to where it's supposed to be going.

Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it.

Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.