“My mother and father were fantastic, very active. I find it difficult to say this, but I’m quite a loving person and I’ve always been loving to my friends. In the long run, that pays off. I’m very interested in other people, and if you are, they’re interested in you.”

A lot of Donna Summer and things that maybe weren’t trendy anymore or weren’t hip in gay clubs but you’d hear them at Taboo.

Relationship is an art. The dream that two people create is more difficult to master than one.

In writing the autobiography, I can really chuckle when I look at the songs. I was acting out the part. I saw myself as a victim.

On Madonna: She’s a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.

And it’s taken me the best part of 54 years to reach that point where I’m like, “I’m very lucky, I’m lucky, I’m blessed” – all of those things. I wish I could impart that to other people but I think when you’re young, you just don’t listen.

The idea that gay people have to mimic what obviously doesn’t work for straight people any more… I think is a bit tragic. I am looking forward to gay divorces.

I was about 16 when punk started to happen… It felt like you had this naive idea that you could change things just by wearing something.

The band never actually split up – we just stopped speaking to each other and went our own separate ways.

For me the most interesting thing about Leigh Bowery was the way he used his body as a style statement. He was a big guy, but, because he was tall and had long legs, he looked in proportion – even sexy – despite being overweight by conventional standards.

Personality is a real aphrodisiac, when somebody is charming or funny. I think certain jobs attract certain types of people.

The world is less homophobic, depending on where you are in the world…

I knew style and content went hand in hand.

As a kid, I would’ve loved to get a tweet from David Bowie or Joan Rivers or Tom Cruise. It’s great that you can communicate with people and it’s instant.

I was about 16 when punk started to happen. It was so exciting. You had a social depression going on in the U.K. There was a sanitation strike. London was really grim, gray. You had Margaret Thatcher coming in. It was a really revolutionary time.

You get the odd person [in social media] that will write something nasty and the trick is not to engage with them on any level.

When I go onstage, I’m going to work …I feel like my performance is about an emotional connection. I want to connect with people, whether it’s like a romantic song or a happy song.

I’m from Kansas, so there were a lot of vacant lots and open fields to tackle each other in so we could avoid tackling each other on the street. But running on the street and trying not to get taken down on the concrete, that will make you fast, that’s for sure.

First of all, I’ve been having a wonderful run of luck with cover albums, songs I didn’t write. I had five pop cover albums and two Christmas albums, and they were all very successful.

Grief is like the wind. When it’s blowing hard, you adjust your sails and run before it. If it blows too hard, you stay in the harbor, close the hatches and don’t take calls.

People compare me to Isiah Thomas because of my quickness and change-of-direction, the way I change speeds and run the team.

Most of us have very clear memories of the self-critical internal conversation running on in our heads while we were playing poorly, and yet it often seems that we hardly remember noticing it at all while we were playing well.

Anyone can run 20 miles. It’s the next six that count.

I think America should amass a strategy for success, and set out the milestones. We need to help the Iraqis get their democracy up and running, we’ve got to help them train their military and police and security people, and we’ve got to start moving out.

It is safe to say that the U.S. Congress is now run by paid staffers, not by people elected to do the job.