Neil Diamond

I think probably Australians have just a little more taste than most people.

I like having a woman. I like having someone to come home to, to make all of the hard work feel worth it. I need someone with me. And I want someone.

I used to go to my kids' soccer games and I was the only parent who wasn't screaming, because I'd have to do a show that night. It was hard. Moms and dads get more emotional at those soccer and Little League games than at a professional game.

I don't feel I have to write deep and meaningful songs; they can be light and meaningless. It has to do with the place I am in my life, a really good place.

I may have a little bit of a talent for music, but I've learnt to tap into my own self when I write. When I put the drill bit inside my heart, sometimes I come up with something light and frothy, sometimes with something deep and painful, but it's great to connect with the audience.

I'm throwing myself back in because I like being married. I don't want to end this whole fabulous journey alone. I want someone by my side who I love and who loves me. I've finally found somebody who's up to the task of being my wife, because I'm very high maintenance.

Songs are life in 80 words or less.

Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest.

Songwritng is what I do.

I've looked at photographs of myself during concerts and it sometimes looks as if I'm in a fencing move, with a guitar in my hands instead of a sword.

Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.

No, I majored in biology, in a pre-med program.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

Brooklyn is not the easiest place to grow up in, although I wouldn't change that experience for anything.

Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song.

I don't like all of the music to be serious and deadly.

I'm lucky. Hard work is the key, but luck plays a part.

I definitely don't feel like I'm 71. I feel like I did when I was - between 30 and 40. The body ages. The mind doesn't.

It's very difficult for me to say 'I love you' but to sing 'I love you' for me is easier.

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

You can't plan to write a great song. It just happens to you. It drops in your lap. It's the same thing with a woman.

I still need practice in enjoying the fruits of success.

When I need my wife or when I need companionship or someone to talk to, I need it, like, now. So my wife will have to give up whatever she's doing at that moment to tend to my needs. And, in the same way, I would tend to hers. That's not such an easy thing to do.