John Mayall

I never really thought about becoming a professional musician.

I write songs about real things… The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

Joe’s been my drummer for 14 years, and we’ve been buddies for six years.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

I keep healthy and I’m always very active and always have been so. I don’t really see any signs of aging yet. Music keeps you young.

Do your thing and don’t care if they don’t like it.

I come from a very small island which is packed with people. I mean, jam-packed with people. I’ve lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity which I try and avoid.

Any single part of Brexit is a mountainous task and that is before you get to the tiny little bits that you understand that we haven’t even thought might be a problem. John Oliver

I have plenty of pet hates. I can’t stand people scraping their plate or slurping their soup. I can’t stand waiting in lines. I hate people talking inanely about the Lord Of The Rings. I hate people whistling. But I’m not like this because I’m famous. I’ve always been a grumpy bastard.

Being jealous of a beautiful woman is not going to make you more beautiful.

[on Sarah Palin returning to Fox News] First tonight, I and the rest of America woke up this morning in the worst way imaginable.

Ryan and I didn’t grow up like this at all, with this much attention. We’ll just try to keep their feet on the ground and raise them with the values we were raised with.

Who can wear the skimpiest outfit? I mean come on. These young girls are talented singers, they don’t need that, but they feel they have to be in competition to have the least covering. That’s the saddest thing.

I did (training in) tennis, ballet, swing dancing, piano, art class and etiquette. I also did French dialect, but then it was mixing me up with my Southern dialect, so we stuck to Southern!

There were a couple of times where you think you’re swimming towards a guy with a breating apparatus and then you find its just some thing in the water and you’re like (imitates freaking out) and then you just know what to do and they film your stupid face just screaming underwater and then everyone starts laughing and its just like, ahh, great.

I’m just chatty. But I do express my opinion.

We were out of work actors who played a lot of video games, so we were sort of surprised that Swingers was seen as cool. I think any cool in it was a geekiness, an awkwardness that most people can relate to.

If you really want something, you’ve gotta just do it and not wait for other people to hand it to you.

I laugh about it now. It was ridiculous, and it was calculatedly decadent. It was pretty horrendous, really. I remember feeling a bit ill at times. You know, in those days, the thing was to live it. And we lived it and loved it, and it was great. But that is another era.

[On struggling to be taken seriously in the industry] Even now, people want to marginalize me. They want to attribute all my success to teenagers seeing my movies. I really resent it when people say, “It’s just a genre film; it’s a teen comedy.” It takes a lot of work to make these things have heart and resonance so they’re not just empty, disposable confections. But I don’t give a damn about other people’s perceptions, because I’ll show them. For women in this business, ascendancy is always a battle. It’s scrape and claw. I just try to stick to my guns and respect myself. I want to take the ingenues aside and say, “Value yourself! It’s O.K. if you have opinions!