Quotes from Richard Ashcroft

If you really, truly believe in something, you're on fire, and your tongue rolls at the same pace.

When you go onstage, the process of getting you from the dressing room to the stage is all about ego.

My job is to make grown men cry, to blow people's minds and elevate them, make them transcend and unlock emotions that have been repressed by life, their job, situation - that's what I do.

I don't want to be responsible for messing up someone. I don't want to be responsible for that, because the things that happened in The Verve, it was heavy stuff. It was real. It wasn't just frivolous nonsense, you know what I mean? There was real people's lives.

Life is about unforgettable and transcendent moments, isn't it? The point of music is to get the moment.

The mad thing is, most of my life, when I'm not in a dark mood, it's been humour that's got me through. The only way to get through this business is by laughing.

I think I was born to be a songwriter.

We'd lie on the floor, turn the lights out, put two speakers on either side of our ears, and try to blow our minds with music. I know that I want to make a record that does that yet a record that, if it was played on the radio at twelve in the afternoon, the guy making the wall - the guy cleaning the motorway - he's got a melody to hang on.

I'm totally up for experimental music. I'm up for music that they don't play on the radio, and I take in all of it. But my thing, the thing that comes most natural to me, is making the stuff that has a melody; it has a soul to it, yet it's head music.

Some people have a God because they need faith, and that's fair enough.

I am so lucky that I have been part of and written songs that will always resonate no matter how old they get.

Really, I listen to more hip hop probably than most other things. That's where I get a lot of my influence from because it's so eclectic. So that's what I love.