Quotes from Gary Numan

Ultravox were the blueprint for what I wanted to do, but I stumbled across them by accident.

When you decide to do this kind of music then you just accept the facts.

I just didn't make music that you could sing with a big grin, still don't.

I have a condition called Aspergers Syndrome, which is like a mild form of autism It means I don't interact properly in certain social situations.

I've got Asperger's syndrome and I'm not a very good people person, so I've always been more comfortable around machinery. Not in a weird way - I don't want to marry my car or anything stupid like that!

It seems no matter what you say and how politically correctly and carefully you say it, you offend someone. Or at least I always do.

I'm hopeless at small talk and have a problem making eye contact.

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since.

I met Gemma, my wife, when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later, she started coming to my concerts, but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was, and that's how it started.

I became an air display pilot. I used to teach it. I was an examiner for a few years as well. It was great fun. I would still be doing it now if pretty much everyone I knew who was doing it hadn't died. In the first team I joined there were six people in it. By the time I stopped, there was only me and one other left - everyone else had died.

I think if you are creative then it's an unstoppable thing. It just keeps coming throughout your entire life.

Strangely enough, when the Sugababes' 'Freak Like Me' went to number 1, which was built around my 'Are 'Friends' Electric' song, I had another song called 'Rip' go to number 1 in the Kerrang TV chart, so I was pulling new people in from very different areas of musical interest. That was quite an amazing week.

Maybe I over-do the 'not-80s' thing. It should be a part of my life that I've got some sort of pride in, but I've got this huge chip on my shoulder about '80s nostalgia - and it annoys fans sometimes.

I became famous so quickly and so young - it was daunting. I was immature and I used to say some really stupid things in interviews. I never smiled on stage so I looked really serious, but it was because I hated my teeth and was incredibly nervous.

When I went to record my first album, which should have been a punk album, there was a synthesiser in the control room. I'd never seen one before but they let me have a go on it and I loved it to bits.

I did an album a long time ago called 'Replicas,' which was entirely science-fiction driven, or science-fantasy. Since then it's been a song here, a song there. It's not really a constant theme. I've written far more about my problems with religion, with God and all that.

I got involved in music because I love everything about it, but now I'm in it you see the other side and it isn't much fun. Not as glamorous and enjoyable as you imagine.

Song-writing is therapy for me. I'm a very moody person, very difficult to live with. There's a lot going on and a lot of contradictions. My life is always one step away from disaster.

Being a display pilot is probably the thing I've been most proud of in my life. Don't really fly anymore now though. I have three small children and as most of my friends were killed in different accidents, I realised that it was probably just a matter of time before I went that way.

I sometimes wonder if I might be a bit of a disappointment to people, because they are expecting all these '80s hits and what they get is a dark industrial wall of noise.

Fame came quickly. I was only 19 when I secured my initial recording contract and my first two hit records - 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and 'Cars' - were number ones.

I was always a bit different. I had a very happy childhood, but I could never hang on to mates.

I'd see an old person on the street and start crying. I couldn't understand how people could cope, knowing they only had so long left. It would be like dominoes and then the last one fell and I'm a little heap on the floor. Doctors put me on anti-depressants for a couple of years.

I have always been far more interested in sound than technique, and how sounds work together, how they can be layered. I think electronic music, in its infancy anyway, allowed us to create music in a way that hadn't really been possible before. It created a new kind of musician.