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The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.

I suppose whenever you go through periods of transition, or in a way, it's a very definite closing of a certain chapter of your life - I suppose those times are always going to be both very upsetting and also very exciting by the very nature because things are changing and you don't know what's going to happen.

There are constant cycles in history. There is loss, but it is always followed by regeneration. The tales of our elders who remember such cycles are very important to us now.

When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course, the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic.

There've always been people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. That state is not a matter of chronological age. It's a matter of understanding that you can accept a future that has been defined by the previous generation, or you can reject it and make something new.

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about.

I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back.

Probably people always feel that they are living in a time of transition, but we can hardly be mistaken perhaps in thinking that this is an era of particularly momentous change, rapid and proceeding at an ever quickening rate.