Every man must play the part of his ambition. If you are trying to be a successful man, you must play the part.
There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.
I go through stages. Randomly, I'll be attracted to a crazy rocker with tattoos. And I find that I'm extremely attracted to ambition and wit.
When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.
As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.
When I read about Gram Parsons' dream of this Cosmic American Music when I was in my late teens, that stuck with me: that idea, that ambition, to draw off the roots of music but take it somewhere fresh.