Yorke: "So ultimately, it's idealistic to think that artists are able to step away from the power of the media and the way it controls things, and go on doing their own things."

Yorke: "I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape."

Yorke: "I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out."

Yorke: "Someone needs to tell the truth, but it shouldn't be my job."

Yorke: "I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music."

Yorke: "We don't have to stand on a soap-box and preach because hopefully we're channelling it through the new record."

Yorke: "I had a series of mini-breakdowns where the public persona - this thing, this face, this person who writes this music... I would walk past that person in the mirror or listen to that person playing guitar and I didn't know who they were."

Yorke: "The people in charge, globally, are maniacs. They are maniacs, and unless we do something about it these people are going to deprive us of a future."

Yorke: "I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind."

Yorke: "And I know I'm paranoid and neurotic, I've made a career out of it."

Yorke: "I think artists can influence only through making music that challenges people, excites them and flips them out. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that's unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in."

Yorke: "If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That's the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We're in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history."

Yorke: "My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art."

Yorke: "I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state."

Yorke: "One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom."

Yorke: "It is difficult to make political art work."

Yorke: "Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there's not enough room for everybody."

Yorke: "At home I've got a very puerile, juvenile sense of humour."

Yorke: "I went to a boys' school, and I didn't realize that most guys join bands because they wanted to get girls. I was not really focused on that the way everybody else was."

Yorke: "We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us."

Yorke: "I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world."

Yorke: "My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that's just the way it is."

Yorke: "I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music."

Yorke: "I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests."

Yorke: "This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer's block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what's going on has really helped."