I'm lucky to be alive.

I have to believe that somebody up there thinks I've still got some work to do.

There is no such thing as a reluctant star.

I find it too terrifying to go out in L.A.

English people have seen me get through scandals.

I went through a long period where I was afraid of doing things I wanted to do, and you get your courage back, which is what's important.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

I do want people to know that the songs that I wrote when I was with women were really about women. And the songs that I've written since have been fairly obvious about men.

Even though it's become a really cliched thing to see musicians working for charity, it's still effective and it still has to be done.

Because of the media, the way the world is perceived is as a place where resources and time are running out. We're taught that you have to grab what you can before it's gone. It's almost as if there isn't time for compassion.

You can't have a child just to keep a relationship together, can you?

In the very early days of Wham! the attention felt great, but I do wonder how much freedom I gave away by trying to become something I wasn't.

I don't really have any traits that I deplore. I get annoyed with myself sometimes, but that's about it.

I spent the first half of my career being accused of being gay when I hadn't had anything like a gay relationship.

A lot of people like me, who've been around for years and years and years, only really lose it in their forties and fifties.

I try very hard to thank my lucky stars and keep it all in proportion and perspective, but it can be very tiring having a smiley face all day.

The first sign of real obsession with music was with an old wind-up gramophone that mum had thrown out into the garage. My parents gave me three old 45s - two Supremes records and one Tom Jones record - and I used to come home from school literally every day, go out to the garage, wind this thing up, and play them.

There are things about my mum that I only realised later, things that make me admire her.

I had been obsessed with insects and creepy-crawlies: I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning and go out into this field behind our garden and collect insects before everyone else got up, and suddenly, all I wanted to know about was music. It just seemed a very, very strange thing.

Deep down, my ego always thought that I would outlast a lot of people that I was competing against.

I'm 10-12 years into life as an out gay man, and I'm a different person. I think there are things about my journey that might be useful to other people, and coming up with a hit record on its own doesn't seem to be enough anymore.

I have no belief in The Bible or religion, but I think Armageddon was a lucky guess. I honestly think it's going to happen.

Apart from some of the videos and haircuts, I don't think I've made any wrong moves, ha ha!

No one wants to look wholesome at 21!

I used to believe that George Michael was a total actor. It was self-defeating, because it made me also feel fraudulent.

The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury.

On my first night at boarding school, I felt entirely alone. I was shocked, frightened and intensely homesick, but I soon discovered that expressing these emotions, instead of bringing help and consolation, attracted a gloating, predatory fascination.

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.

After my cancer diagnosis this year, I was offered a choice of treatments. I wanted to make an informed decision. This meant reading scientific papers. Had I not used the stolen material provided by Sci-Hub, it would have cost me thousands.

There is a tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. A lively, meaningful democracy would achieve a balance between the two.

Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars.

I do not want to abandon representative democracy. I want to see it balanced by popular sovereignty, especially the variety known as deliberative democracy.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.

If our grazing land was allowed to revert to natural ecosystems, and the land currently used to grow feed for livestock was used for grains, beans, fruit, nuts and vegetables for humans, this switch would allow the UK to absorb an astonishing quantity of carbon.

We can expect commercial enterprises to attempt whatever lawful ruses they can pull off. It is up to society, represented by government, to stop them, through the kind of regulation that has so far been lacking.

I believe resilience is the most useful human quality, and I've sought to cultivate it, but in 2019 I felt my resolve begin to weaken at times as it has never done before.

While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

There are, I believe, three steps to overcoming fear: name it, normalise it, socialise it.

Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.

One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.

Rainforests are not confined to the tropics: a good definition is forest wet enough to support epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants. Particularly in the west of Britain, where tiny fragments persist, you can find trees covered in rich growths of a fern called polypody, mosses and lichens, and flowering plants climbing the lower trunks.

Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.

Emotionally damaged men all too often rip apart their own lives, and those of their partners and children. I see both physical fitness and emotional strength as virtues, but they are acquired by entirely different means.

Surplus money allows some people to exercise inordinate power over others: in the workplace; in politics; and above all in the capture, use and destruction of the planet's natural wealth.

Representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election, yet the vote tends to swing on just one or two of them.

If commercial fishing were excluded from large areas of the sea, the total catch would be likely, paradoxically, to rise, due to what biologists call the spillover effect.

If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don't invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.

After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation.

As SUVs are higher and heavier, they are more likely to kill the people they hit. Driving an SUV in an urban area is an antisocial act.