Albarn: "I think pop music is a great place to get new ideas across."

Albarn: "You know, there are many alter egos and Gorillaz is a collective of alter egos, really. I think anyone who gets involved in it has to sort of accept that nothing is really as it seems."

Albarn: “I’ve always known I’m incredibly special. All my life. You know? It’s not a big deal.”

Albarn: "The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie."

Albarn: “What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you’re not really learning much.”

Albarn: “There’s need to be some sort of disturbance in your psyche for creativity to be sparked.”

Albarn: "I'm a working musician, so it's what I do. I kind of always have lots of plates spinning, and it's the ones that keep spinning the longest that I end up doing."

Albarn: "I want to be a better person in every aspect. I really don't feel I've in anyway fulfilled my potential in every area of my life. But I'm optimistic."

Albarn: "The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?"

Albarn: "The things that make me happy most are my family and working."

Albarn: “Each individual has their own opinions about whether war is an answer to any problems. Personally I think it’s a waste of time, but I think more importantly, that it’s is an issue that we haven’t had any say in. That’s why I feel so strongly about it. I don’t feel like we’ve really been given any choice in this matter. I think if you had a referendum tomorrow, Tony Blair would have no choice but to call off the war.”

Albarn: "If you don't see something as a career but as an important part of your life, you don't know how you're going to feel about it."

Albarn: "And there are no stars and that you're never really sure who's doing what and what voice is what and, you know what I mean? It's supposed to be quite elusive."

Albarn: "It's not like my old self - I'm not in character anymore, I'm me. I'm not hiding behind that anymore."

Albarn: “I’m slightly ambivalent to the whole relationship between the whole advertising world and music. I think sometimes it works and sometimes it’s a really bad mismatch. I think on this occasion its fine because the iPod is like your own mini-library and that can’t be a bad thing. It promotes eclecticism and that’s very much what we are about so it’s a good relationship.”

Albarn: "As soon as it sounds fine, I'm on to the next thing, man."

Albarn: "Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling."

Albarn: “My guaranteed way of sending myself into deep depression is to read music trade papers and watch MTV.”

Albarn: “I like to put my iPad on the window and leave it there for however long the journey is, so that I’m staring out, and it’s staring out. We’re kind of staring out together. It’s very poetic to me, watching that absent-minded passing of time. You realize how much you’ve taken in. What is left of that memory of you staring out of the window for an hour? It’s all on the iPad.”

Albarn: "Trying to write music that's sensitive to 400 years ago takes a bit of madness, as it's such a long stretch of time."

Albarn: "No, every album is something like a snapshot. It only shows one moment in time. It shows what we feel and think right at that point in time, nothing more and nothing less."

Albarn: “I used to go to work and take heroin in the studio and then stop when I came home.”

Albarn: “A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that’s why it was interesting, because it wasn’t music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn’t necessarily thinking in the third-person then.”

Albarn: “Every time I go to Africa, I see the future. I see what the Western world is going to become. It’s a very futuristic place.”

Albarn: "It always struck me that Africa was, in a strange way, a futuristic place and had elements and vibes and spirits that were going to inform the future. Africa Express is an attempt to engage that power outside Africa, and for everyone to benefit from it."

Albarn: “I have to wear a new T-shirt every night. I throw them into the audience. One day I’m going to go around the world and reclaim all my T-shirts”

Albarn: "I don't need to be a frontman all the time, and in fact, the older I get, the less of an urge it is inside me to play that role. I've still got it inside me, and I do occasionally allow it out."

Albarn: "I'm not a monarchist. But I'm English. And I have an irrational emotion for my country."

Albarn: "The whole period has taught me that I enjoy being part of an ensemble rather than just a front man. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy that too, but I get more enjoyment out of really listening to everyone."

Albarn: "I enjoyed history at school. I'd always had a sense of pagan England."

Albarn: “I was naive enough to believe it would be enough to replace the government. Well, I made fun of the people in the government and then realized that even if we got rid of them, they were replaced by exactly the same guys.”

Albarn: "Music is something that should speak for itself, straight from the heart. It took me a long time to understand that."

Albarn: "China is one of those vast, continental conglomerates that... I mean, if they were to start a tourist trade in China, they'd just bus people in from another province, you know what I mean? They're very self-contained."

Albarn: "I'm not really one of those people who believes that if you're a musician you can just leave that behind and start getting into politics."

Albarn: "I spent two years figuring out how I could turn it into something that would satisfy me as a musician but also make some kind of cross-cultural link. I feel that I kind of at least touched on the possibilities of cross-cultural music, but it is a lifetime's work, and I don't profess to be anything other than a novice at it."

Albarn: “Change terrifies people. They like new, but they don’t like new with change.”

Albarn: "When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this."

Albarn: “I’m an English songwriter/composer, working in Mandarin and trying to find something about Chinese culture that I really relate to and respect and feel some genuine emotions for – and it’s quite hard, the pentatonic scale, and that, in a way, is why I think it works. Because I’m forced to limit myself to quite strict rules about what I did. Maybe that’s how I avoided pastiche.”

Albarn: “Well, as resources inevitably disappear [in Africa], people have to make do with a lot less. You have to be much more ingenious with a lot less, and accept that you can’t get your perfect tuna sandwich on a street corner.”

Albarn: "I can't be bothered anymore about giving songs titles."

Albarn: "I was approached by Oxfam to go to Mali as their ambassador and get involved in their various initiatives out there. But I felt that was missing the point of using me, a musician."