I believe in civil partnerships as it protects each partner. Whether I believe in marriage is a different thing.

My wife Jane left me for another man. Then I fell in love with a bloke. I have been gay ever since.

I was bisexual for a long time. I flitted between men and women quite a lot between the ages of 17 and 26.

I met Prince Harry at Westminster and I want him to be my new boyfriend, but unfortunately I don't think it is going to happen.

Sometimes people need to think of themselves as lions or tigers. Even panthers.

With 'The X Factor' I think the audiences have lost faith and trust in it so that's its problem. You want to be watching something real and dynamic and something you can trust and believe in.

People tend to think when you're at the top, you need bashing down. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Ricky Whittle is fabulous.

For personality, you're not going to get better than Ricky Groves. He really goes for it.

I play the Wicked Queen in 'Snow White.' I'm not typecast. It's terrible. I should be Prince Charming.

Don't get me wrong, I really like being a judge on 'Strictly.' But my first love and passion is directing and choreography and I will be doing that until the day I die.

I grew up with 'Chess' and the music from the show.

I'm a lovely person, considerate and loving.

All my ex-boyfriends, bar one, are my best friends.

What would people be surprised to know about me? That I love cooking and chopping wood for the heating system in my house.

Discovering that my great-great-grandfather Harry was Australasian clog-dancing champion in 1871 was extraordinary.

I danced with Courtney Act, which was absolutely fantastic.

I'd adopt an older child, not a baby.

My signature dish is seafood lasagne - massive king prawns, smoked haddock, cod and a white sauce.

I love getting in the kitchen because I don't get the chance when I'm staying in hotels and on the road.

I like getting blotto at parties but I also like being sober and I hate the hangover.

I'm tongue in cheek, but very much to the point.

Love Island' is for people who aren't celebrities, who've done nothing in their life and are trying to be someone and get something to be famous.

Strictly' is nothing like 'Love Island'… absolutely not.

But 'Strictly' is meant to showcase people with talents in acting, singing, sports, journalism… not fame-seekers with no discernible talent.

The BBC don't pay what they pay in America or on ITV.

Buying my new house in the country wasn't about showing off or being something I'm not, like Madonna when she turned into the country lass with her tweeds on.

I go through the same trials and tribulations as anyone else.

I might be a celebrity but I've still got to have the dosh.

Intellectual property is a key aspect for economic development.

We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy.

Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution. Manufacturing will shift from centralised factories to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to the rise of 3D printer technology.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.

Life is a DNA software system.

Even though people pretend that medical records are privileged information, anyone can already get their hands on them.

I think I'm a survivor. I could have suffered at least 100 professional deaths. I could come up with a list of the 100 times I've come closest to death, from having pneumonia as a child to car crashes.

I'm hoping that these next 20 years will show what we did 20 years ago in sequencing the first human genome, was the beginning of the health revolution that will have more positive impact in people's lives than any other health event in history.

Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.

Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.

The fact that I have a risk genetically for Alzheimer's and blindness is not great news. But the reality is that any one of us will have dozens of these risks, and what we have to learn is how to deal with them.

Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.

It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.

I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I've always been a slow learner. It's critical in terms of the cost of health care.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.