MUSIC
'They're not actually libertines. How they can call themselves that is beyond me. It's beyond me why anyone would be interested in them. It's not thier songs.'
- Peter Doherty displays not a trace of bitterness.
‘I’m not really interested in celebrities. I couldn’t give two shits about Brad and Jen breaking up or whatever.’
- Electric Six’s Dick Valentine

‘Is rap dangerous? No more than football, politics or the military.’
- Snoop

‘I’m still living at home, on a back-to-work scheme. People look at you on the TV and think that you’re loaded. Me and me father live in Donaghmede, me mother’s in North Strand. I go there when I’m sick of me aul’ fella or he’s sick of me. It’s a bit embarrassing bringing someone home. Me aul’ fella would be roaring down the stairs, 'what are you doing?'’
- Damo Dempsey on the perks of fame

‘My first weekend in Los Angeles, I found myself in a swimming pool with nine naked women making out with each other.’
- James Blunt on the pitfalls of fame
‘The medical establishment’s attitude to people who admit that they’ve had a little smoke is pretty scary. They don’t give you the benefit of the doubt that you can manage and you understand your own mind and you know your limits.’
- Roots Manuva on being sent for psychiatric treatment

‘I always tell women, ‘When you come in this room, there is going to be a surveillance camera.’ It’s not only for legal reasons. I enjoy watching it too, if I feel like I’ve performed.’
- 50 Cent

‘It’s one of the worst places to raise a child in the world. There are kids, 11 or 12 years old, running around right now with 9mm’s that will blow your fuckin’ brains off your shoulders if you say something stupid. Our motto in Compton is ‘kill or be killed’. To have made it out of that shit is a fuckin’ miracle.’
- Hip-hop sensation The Game fondly recalls his idyllic Compton youth

‘Kasabian are so fucking Stone Roses it’s fucking obscene. For someone to be that Stone Roses, you think, ‘Oh, come on, fucking pack it in'. The Clone Roses don’t sound so much like the Stone Roses as Kasabian do.'
- New Order’s Peter Hook

‘I’ve finally stopped beating myself up. I used to think I was a monster and didn’t deserve to live’
- Sinéad O’Connor

‘The reason why I wouldn’t commit suicide…well, the main reason now is 'cos I have a baby and I would never commit suicide because of her. To me, committing suicide from a nihilistic point of view is pointless, because we’re all going to die anyway, so why not just hang around and see what happens?’
- Coldplay’s Chris Martin

‘I wasn’t out of it on drugs. But just before I went on stage Peaches (Geldof) squeezed my bum hard and whispered something rather suggestive to me. It left me in such shock I didn’t know where I was. I was facing 210,000 people, the cameras were rolling, fucking Elton John is dueting with me and Bob Geldof’s 16-year-old daughter had just made a pass at me. It’s all I could think about. It did my head in. I didn’t think Bob would be very happy.’
- Pete Doherty explains his Live 8 fiasco

‘There you have it, the future of English rock’n’roll – a rent boy who lets his missus sing with him.’
- Liam Gallagher on Doherty
‘If you meet me, I’m a very pleasant person to be around, and I never get mad with anyone personally. But there’s so much to be angry about: there’s capitalism and the patriarchy and the entire western way of life to contend with. How could I not complain?’
- Lydia Lunch: two sides of the beast

‘I’m the son of a steelworker and I drink in pubs. I’ve been playing Working Mens’ Clubs since I was 11. If I have a hit record, great. If not, I couldn’t care less. I’ve no desire to be a celebrity, and I can imagine how my family and mates would react if I ever tried to get on like one.’
- Three cheers for Richard Hawley
‘Our attitude going into the studio was very much, ‘The last record was alright, but this one has to be a classic.’
- Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos

‘I spent years being skint and not really thinking about it, and now I’ve a bit of money I’m not really thinking about that either.’
- Kapranos again

‘I was very lucky to be in circles of extremely talented people. They certainly weren’t doing it for fun: they were doing it because music was in their blood.’
- Tara Blaise

‘I know we all still love making music and I know we all still bleed for it. I don’t find it hard to keep that fire.’
- Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins

'The moment I gave up and thought 'fuck it, I can't write anymore, the minute I stopped trying, that's when it started to happen and the album came together.'
- Gemma Hayes

'People say that what I do on stage is offensive or childish. But it's meant to be childish. Children are honest; they don't try to decieve. They have the whole world in front of them. They're not afraid. Kinds are willing to embrace the new and the different, and I want to make adults feel the same way.'
- Marilyn Manson

MOVIES
‘I don’t like people being able to see my eyes. I think they can see too much about me, about what I get up to.’
- Wong Kar-Wai explains the ever-present shades

‘Ray was a hard sell. Although his life is fascinating and he’s a brilliant artist, Ray Charles was a heroin addict and could be an absolute bastard to people close to him.’
– Taylor Hackford on the darker side of the recently-deceased legend

‘Obviously you feel a sense of revulsion about their acts. But if Kevin Bacon’s character Walter visits tragedies on others, it’s important to understand that he himself is borne of tragedy.’
– Nicole Kassell, co-screenwriter of The Woodsman, on the complexities of paedophilia

‘You’d think chicks would be wary after Swingers. But no, if anything, I find that they decide you’re more attractive when you’re in movies and on the front of magazines.’
- Vince Vaughan on the pitfalls of fame

‘To make a film about the Rwandan genocide that depicted the actual physical violence with machetes would have been beyond a horror film.’
- Hotel Rwanda director Terry George

‘Good riddance to bad trash. She was a hooker, a scumbag, a lying trollop. I’m glad Traynor taught her how to suck cock. I dropped several ejaculations down her throat and I wish I could do a final load so when she goes to hell, my sperm will go with her.’
- Al Goldstein fondly recalls ex-colleague, the late porn star Linda Lovelace

‘I still wake up at night with butterflies in my stomach because I just can’t believe that something I was playing around with at night on my computer is out there as a film.’
- Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette

‘I hung around with some of the transvestite scene for preparation, and I had the best time. They’re just the wittiest people. If you’re walking around in a dress all day, you have to be ready with the barbs to defend yourself.’
- Cillian Murphy prepares to play a cross-dresser for Breakfast in Pluto

‘I’ve come to think of Jane Austen as the first British realist. I suspect she didn’t receive as much of the male gaze as most of her peers, and that enabled her to sit back and observe.’
- Joe Wright, director of Pride And Prejudice

'Once I had this girl come up and say "I wanna be your pie", but I wasn't prepared for it and ended up cowering away in the nearest corner.'
- Jason Biggs, of American Pie-fucking notoriety, on the pitfalls of fame

‘I also like doing dangerous things with large numbers of chickens and hookers occasionally. Well, I am a guy.’
- Mr. Biggs again
‘Some people will think I’m a neo-Nazi or a lesbian. After all the crazy hairstyles I had to endure for the films, it’s quite liberating to have no hair.’
- Natalie Portman

'I love older guys. Well, a certain kind of older guy like Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford or Steve McQueen or Robert Redford or Warren Beatty'
- Jessica Alba

'It would have been a crime not to take the piss out of the left and the right, because they're both holier than thou.'- South Park co-creator Matt Stone (a republican) on his Team America: World Police

BOOKS
‘I started drinking worse than I ever had before and I came really close to dying. My heart would not beat correctly; it was missing beats. And I realised that I was okay with dying. I also felt very, very, very old.’
- Author Augusten Burroughs recalls his wild years

‘Sometimes when I read some of the nasty stuff about me, things that say I’m smug or a smart-aleck – put the word ‘Jew’ after those things and see how it sounds. They are all adjectives that tend to be ascribed to Jews, and I think there’s something going on below the level of consciousness that sometimes has to do with that. Particularly, this idea that the Jew is a bit too clever for his own good.'
- David Baddiel

‘Having given up the gargle, it’s such a fundamental change in your life that it colours everything else you do…Binge drinking for me is when you start off at the Birr Vintage Car Rally and finish up in San Francisco without realising exactly how you got there.’
- Declan Lynch, author of The Rooms.

‘The arrival of kids and mortgages and that particular shock to the system is ultimately good for men. It’s stressful, but they’re happier within themselves ‘cos they’ve got responsibility. But left to our own devices, we seek…we’re always looking, and that’s a cause of frustration and an awful lot of pain.’
- Dermod ‘Bootboy’ Moore, author of Diary Of A Man.

‘The one great thing that every motherfucker in this room is going to do, we’re all going to die. We don’t know when or how it’s going to happen, but we’re going, and whether you have everything or nothing in this life, your ass is gonna die. So just groove!’
- Marsha Hunt on the inevitable.

COMEDY
'I had one girl from some RTE programme come up to me recently and ask was I going to do her'
- Blizzard Of Odd's Colin Murphy on the pitfalls of fame.
‘The local pubs round here are brilliant. Some of them have shuttle buses that drop you home pissed at three in the morning.’
- Eddie Bannon enthuses about life in Rush, Co Dublin.
‘If God didn’t want comedy to be filthy, he wouldn’t have put the word ‘come’ in it.’
- Carol Tobin, the artist formerly known as Penny Tration

POLITICS
‘You bung the council a bit of dough and there you go, you’ve got a shitty new yuppie housing project, and all the people who lived in that area for three generations who haven’t got 200 grand to spend are now in a sink estate somewhere.’
- Doves’ Jimi Goodwin takes a dim view of ‘inner-city regeneration’ in the town he loved so well

‘I’ve sort of been forced into being political just by being gay in general. Living in America you’ve got no choice but to be political. It’s really not our fault, it was sort of brought into the fray by the Republicans themselves.’
- Rufus Wainwright

‘No person should be subject to summary execution on the grounds of expediency, convenience, economic considerations. Whatever factors are behind the decision, I don’t believe it can be morally defended for a second. It’s the ultimate capitalist policy. I also note that a lot of people on the left are now coming around to the same position.’
- Socialist MP George Galloway on abortion

‘When I was arrested in 1996, I was treated like the Jews were treated by the Gestapo, like Irishmen and women were treated by the Black and Tans. The Gardai used oppressive tactics not dissimilar to those used behind the Iron Curtain.’
- Frank McBrearty Jr. on his remarkable experience at the hands of An Garda Siochana

- ‘We all have so much politician cock in our gobs, we couldn’t speak if we tried. What Bob (Geldof) and Bono are achieving, they don’t need to be sucking politicians’ cocks to achieve it…Politicians never say the word love. They never suggest solving the world’s problems in loving ways. And so they think war is how you fix things.’
– Chomsky-esque insight from Sinéad O’Connor