Being wild can be wearing a silly hat. Being wild can be dancing weird. Being wild can be shooting people. What do I think being wild is? Nothing. Actually, the whole world is wild. Everything is wild.
Even at a McFly show, if I don't have a guitar for a few minutes... and suddenly being on my own, without my band mates and on the dance floor with no instrument and not singing, it will be absolutely terrifying.
True freedom is always spiritual. It has something to do with your innermost being, which cannot be chained, handcuffed, or put into a jail.
Our world is utterly saturated with fear. We fear being attacked by religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved.
I had a problem with cops pulling me over all the time for speeding. When I was doing Hill Street Blues, the cops said how much they loved the show as they were writing me up; meanwhile my insurance went through the roof.
When faced with a loss, it is no use trying to recover what has gone. On the other hand, a great space has been opened up in your life - there it lies, empty, waiting to be filled with something new. At the moment of one's loss, contradictory as this might seem, one is being given a large slice of freedom.
In life, loss is inevitable. Everyone knows this, yet in the core of most people it remains deeply denied - 'This should not happen to me.' It is for this reason that loss is the most difficult challenge one has to face as a human being.
I don't want the books to become PR exercises for the police; I want to have the freedom to write about cops who cross the line: bad cops.
If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods, and it turns out the stolen goods don't show up but the cops show up, I think you're going to have a very weak story saying, 'Well, I got swindled here.'
The very things I used to be told off for - daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being reckless - for these, suddenly, I am being praised.
If you have somebody who can just do everything easily, then it's kind of boring. If you're handcuffed to a chair and you've got to fight while your handcuffed, or something like that, it just adds a cool element.
We are all today being monitored in advance and in criminal suspicion. And I think that's terrifying, and deeply illiberal as concept. And that's something that we should reject.
Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.
It's terrifying. It's so scary, because you get used to being around the crew and being friendly with everyone and then suddenly, at a certain point, everything switches and you're the one standing behind the lights and nobody's going to help you. And that can be really difficult sometimes.
If you look at UFC champions: BJ Penn - terrifying! GSP - terrifying! Anderson Silva - terrifying! But I'm not terrifying.
Sometimes I'll be somewhere, and the cops will show up to kick me out and end up just asking for a photo.