We, as sportsmen, we’re not used to just sitting at home and being at home all day. We want to go out. We want to play sport. We want to be in the gym, want to train; we want to hit balls, and when you’re not physically able to do that, it’s really tough. It starts playing on the mind a lot more.

Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality

Fame invades your private life. It takes away from the time that you spend with friends, and the time that you can work. It tends to isolate you from the real world.

Do not heal in isolation. Connecting with others is how we develop compassion for others and for ourselves.

Having not really written any generational songs – I think maybe two or three of the songs that I’ve ever written have any bearing on the age of the listener. My stuff tends to be far more concerned with the spiritual and with subjects like isolation and being miserable.

My particular thing is discovering what can be done with media and how it can be used. You can’t draw people together like one big huge family, people don’t want that. They want isolation or a tribal thing.

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude—which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones—Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.

In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of cooperation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.