I don't like the royal family, I don't like the establishment, I don't like the civil service.
[My mother] is much more musical, and by the time I started writing songs - by the time I was about 17 - she started to believe in me, musically.
When you shake you ass, they notice fast. And some mistakes were built to last.
My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion - 24 hours a day for years.
I have definitely reached the same level as Madonna in terms of sales. I'm really pleased about that.
I was supposed to be a real Thatcherite. Just by dint of being a first-generation immigrant and having not had money, and then suddenly having it - and getting on planes and going to Ibiza and sitting around in thongs. But actually nothing I was writing or doing was even vaguely Thatcherite.
The only difficulty is that I'm playing to two audiences, and it's too bad the noise detracts from the show, because it's a great show. I've seen my own self out there, and it's a very good musical show. Sometimes the show gets lost in the hysteria and sometimes it doesn't.
A chemist who is not a physicist is nothing at all.
To be a well-rounded person and know what's going on in the world around you, to have a perspective outside of your sport, is important for every athlete. I'm blessed that our parents gave us that.
Creativity comes from constraint.
A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often I am like a small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me.