Chris Martin

I’m just a public-schoolboy. I’ve got a degree. I’m from a middle-class family in Devon. I’ve got no story.

Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I’m the only person who can’t understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they’re not that great. These are questions everyone has.

Although it’s painful at the time, most of the things that people have said about us negatively – some of them are true and you can work on them, and the ones that you don’t agree with, you don’t work on.

The goal is to try and make the perfect song. Which of course will never happen.

Before our albums are released I feel like we still own it, that we have control over our music. But once it’s out there in the world it’s no longer ours.

You can sometimes get your own feelings across more strongly if you pretend that you’re singing it from someone else’s angle. But it’s always from me. It’s just a new way of framing it.

[On working with Woody Allen] That was a very surreal experience: I had studied the script right down to the punctuation marks, and then he would say ‘we’re not going to say what’s on the page, and you don’t really have to either, try to keep up.’

You know my heart couldn’t take it.

No, I don’t talk to Carly – that’s sort of the point about divorce.

I don’t care what I look like; it’s how people think of me. I do care how people think of me. I want people to say, ‘Oh, she’s nice,’ rather than, ‘Oh, she’s so pretty.’

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it

I don’t want to be somebody else.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to hear.

I don’t have any illusions anymore. The illusion that rock ‘n’ roll could change anything – I don’t believe that. I’ve changed. Who would have ever thought that I’d end up saying that I want to be an all-around entertainer? But that’s what I want to be.

The rain can’t stop the vibes that are going to be created TODAY!!!

We need to stop talking about whether women are funny. And we need to acknowledge that black people are funnier than white people. Let’s discuss that.

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.

It is also a testament to the role that Ireland and its citizens have played towards combating world hunger, poverty and under-development in agriculture and rural development,

If people don’t like me for whatever I do, for being me, then that’s too bad. I don’t want to change to be something that I’m not for other people to like me.

My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort – and it was cute.

When you get a chance to step back, you notice all these great things you’ve done and all these great people that you’ve worked with.