Things can change very fast in football.

Every footballer has his ups and downs.

You always have to remain professional. I have always done so.

I want to show on the training pitch that I am ready whenever the manager needs me.

For a national player it is a good thing to get experience playing abroad.

Moving abroad brings you on both as a player and a person.

The more people that write me off, the stronger I get.

I had a great time at SV Werder Bremen and I'm grateful to the club.

Moving to London enables me to fulfil a dream and a further step in my career. The Premier League has always represented a great challenge for me.

Goals often come from a mistake much further up the field, yet the analysis and blame will always be on the defence.

We cannot take responsibility for every goal we concede, we all need to do our part across the field to ensure we win as a team.

Arsene Wenger is a coach who has a very special personality. He has an experience that not many coaches have, and all at one club, at Arsenal.

Playing at the highest level really is something special for me.

There are not a lot of German players out there who are successful in a foreign country.

I was with Bremen in a good situation in the Bundesliga. I was the captain and was involved in everything to do with the club.

As long as you are winning it is a good day.

Sometimes as a player you have a different view and you can't believe what we did as a defensive unit.

When something is heartwarming and triumphant, and not corny or preachy, it's such a powerful thing.

I realise there are situations where I camp it up, make myself into a sort of novelty character to ease things along. Like, if I ever feel uncomfortable in a situation, I can just make myself into this funny Will-and-Grace-guest-star type of person, and maybe people will not pay attention to the deeper things going on.

I'm just doing what I want. I'm not thinking, like, 'Today I'm going to dress like a woman.' I'm not even thinking about that. I'm just thinking, 'I want to wear this today; I want to be this today.'

I think the best mood for writing is a heavy feeling that's a little bit removed from you. Sometimes I feel very self-indulgent and bratty and ungrateful, and no good music comes out of that. But sometimes I can be really sad or have an excess of feeling yet somehow be able to see the big picture more.

I'm really into gay stuff getting funded: having it be on TV and having a show.

If I drink coffee, I have to turn the lights off and lay down. I can't handle it.

When I watch alien movies, I want to be the alien. I don't want to be the people that make first contact or anything; I just want to be that creature.

My mom is not religious, but she's a very spiritual, magical kind of lady. One time, when I was younger, my mom said she was a witch and that my grandmother was also a witch. It was late at night, and she was really sleepy, but I took it very seriously because I always wanted to go to Hogwarts.

I like Yoda. I like the Ewoks.

I feel like I've figured out the way that I can talk about things that are important to me and have my music and the way of performance be healing and be helpful.

The thing is everything is good at the Cheesecake Factory. Everything's good. It's science-based. It's a formula; there's math. It's all good!

When I started to allow myself to not be locked into wearing men's clothes, things kind of opened up. It feels very kind to drape yourself in something that feels special.

I don't feel like I make sense in the world. I don't feel like I look right. I don't feel like I act right or do right. It's very frustrating to me that I just walk around with this all the time.

It took me a long time to not think of the universe as a judgmental debit-credit system. I haven't completely shaken it, but I no longer think that I am overdrawn with God. Grace is not something you earn; its always there. I find this idea a lot more fun.

Taking care of myself is not instinctual for me. It feels very weird.

I get in my own way a lot. I feel a lot more confident than I... am.

I think people have a hard time dealing with a bunch of things at once. They can't have something be disturbing and funny at the same time. They can't have that kind of combination. Which is weird to me because I feel complicated about most things.

I play a lot of role-playing games on the computer. And I always have.

I like when I tweet about Tony Hawk. A lot of times, people think it's true; like, I've tweeted about having lunch with him a lot, and people are like, 'Oh, how was he?' or, like, 'Do you have a pic?' I don't know how to explain it. He's right at the level where people could almost believe it, but it's also a really weird pairing.

I started writing songs later in life because I just couldn't commit to it before.

It used to be enough for me to get on stage and sing. I kind of crave the performance part now. I write knowing it's going to happen, which I didn't do before.

I'm pretty sure I would have managed to over-share no matter what time period I was born in. It's a family thing, too.

I think if you know one direction, then you can feel the other one. I don't think you can be truly, insanely joyous if you haven't ever felt the flip side of it.

There was one time I flagged every 'Brokeback Mountain' review on Netflix that was negative. I was, like, 'not helpful,' and I spent, like, an hour doing it, and I wrote a really serious review about it. It's hard for me not to get really sensitive. I don't brush things off like that very easily.

Music helped me, growing up: it very much felt like a companion and made me less lonely.

For a while, I thought I would maybe be a writer. But with music, I was such a nerd; I was really obsessive about it. The problem was I couldn't really sing. I think one day I sang from a different part of my body, from my gut for the first time, and I was like, 'Oh! That's how you're supposed to do it.'

My favorite movie is 'Dogfight' with River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. The ending is kind of bittersweet but so real and moving and complicated.

I've had people send messages that said, 'I'm sorry how I treated you in high school.' It was just through kindness. I still think of the world the same way I did growing up. When I got hurt, I decided that this is how people are. But the world is changing, and even those people have changed. And I have. I need to let go, too.

I was really scared of the devil growing up: I was convinced I was going to be possessed.

I don't ever necessarily feel masculine or feminine. I just feel... I don't know. Like, when I'm wearing women's clothes, it's not like I'm dressing like a lady, a woman; it's just like I'm doing whatever I want.

I was scared of the devil starting around age nine. Before that, I was gathering every family member in the living room, slipping a shirt over my robe so the bottom hung like a skirt and performing Gloria Estefan songs with feverish intensity.

Blushes are fun. I like to do circles - like a Caravaggio painting almost, or Victorian looking.

I sort of trust myself as a musician to experiment more and to know when things are more effective when they're spare and when a song can hold up to a lot of different instrumentations. So I'm more willing to go for it.