I didn't spend my childhood trying to be a performer; it was a big surprise to me that this was what I was doing. But it has always felt quite natural to me. I wasn't taught to do what I do; I found out bit by bit.

I've always been attracted to weirdos.

It's not nice to be called a nutter, because it dismisses the input I've had into my own destiny over the years.

I respect Lady Gaga's work as an artist and as a fellow fashion icon. She is a very talented performer, playing the piano, singing live, and dancing, too.

Peggy Guggenheim is a real hero to have done what she did in a man's world, as the art world still is.

I'm really into architecture, I'm a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I'm a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.

Performance was a shock to me. The first time I remember feeling I could do it was during the making of my first video, 'Fun for Me.' I couldn't sleep the night before the shoot, I was so frightened. I had to play a ghost and a piece of merchandise in a shop window, and I had no idea whether I was going to be able to pull it off.

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

Being able to express yourself is one of the hardest things in the world.

The reason why I'm not a pop star is I would have hated it. I'll stick to being an artist. I'm not trying not to be commercial; I am just doing what I do. I have finely tuned tastes, and that gets prioritized above everything else. That's just how it is.

My father ruined me for men. Not many can live up to him.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

My da used to sing 'Take Her Up to Monto' to me when we were walking down the street - he still does, actually - because it's got a walking tempo, and I still sing it to myself when I'm walking along.

When I was 16 and on a tour of Europe, I fell in love with Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France. I'd quite like to live in it.

That's the good thing about pop. You can do whatever you like... it's a bendable medium.

One night, my father woke me up because he'd come home with a horse. Two days later, I asked my mother where it was, and she said it had run away. She'd sold it.

I think my whole career has been marked - or marred - by what people presume about me. But even that's fed back into the creativity. I'm saying that I'm about contradiction, that you can't put me into a box.

I was about 10 when I first began to sing. My mother had been away for three weeks, and I learned 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina.' When she came back, I sang it in front of her, my auntie Linda, my father, my uncle Jim, and my grandmother.

When I started out, the idea of wearing interesting clothes seemed to contradict the idea of being a serious artist. The first Moloko record, 'Do You Like My Tight Sweater?' was kind of a reaction to all that.

I went to bed on the night of Brexit, of that vote for leaving the E.U., and I said to everyone it will be a 70/30: nobody wants to leave the E.U. I woke up on the bus in Glastonbury, and everybody had their heads in their hands. They could not believe it. I could not believe it.

I just wouldn't enjoy standing there like a paper doll, having someone else stick paper dresses on me. That would be no fun.

I work extremely hard, but I love every minute of it. Although I couldn't work as hard if I felt there was a ceiling on anything. I spent £125,000 on four pictures for the sleeves for 'Overpowered,' and I loved spending it! It was like making a little movie.

My family were wheeler-dealer class. They were their own bosses and very glamorous. We lived in a beautiful, big townhouse in Arklow, in Ireland, that we couldn't afford to heat. My father had a business fitting bar furniture, and my mother is an antiques dealer.

I feel more like an artist than a pop star, and I accidentally fell into what I do. Everything was just an experiment.

At 16, I got housing benefit, and I had my own flat in an old woman's house. I was the only 16-year-old I knew living alone.

I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I'm always up for a bit of experimentation.

I always try to lace my work with just a teensy-weensy bit of humour. It's rather like putting a sprig of feathery stuff in a flower arrangement: I believe humour is a great balancer.

Once I was embraced by gay culture, I finally started to feel I was fitting in. I was understood by those people in a way I had never predicted or courted.

I've seen massive changes in Ireland in my lifetime.

I was surrounded by music in my family, surrounded by people who sang songs - every single person I knew as a child growing up had one, two, three songs they knew from start to finish.

Lyricism was placed into my head in Ireland.

When you're a kid, right, and you're surrounded by all these other kids, and let's say they don't have the same interests or the same goals or the same world view as you... It's difficult because a child doesn't know that there's another way. A child doesn't know that there's another place outside of the systems and hierarchies in school.

On 'Overpowered,' there was a nostalgia for disco and early house music. But I'm a modernist and futurist as well. I do believe - and this is going to sound really pretentious, I know - that humanity will figure it out, so I'm optimistic about the future.

You've got to deal with the tools you have in hand. I'm a firm believer in that.

I have a little antennae, and even when I'm trying not to be, I'm connected with the bloody zeitgeist.

I'm not someone to sit on her laurels.

My uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'

Me making music happened not even from a desire to make records.

I've worked all my life not to be a simpleton.

It all started with music for me. Everything still does.

The day I turned 16, I moved into my own flat. My parents had just broken up, and I didn't want to go back to Ireland with my mother. I was doing my A-levels, and my friends would come over and watch 'Twin Peaks.'

I'm brave and fearless when I'm performing, but in real life, I'm actually quite prudish.

My family are all mad. But I got a lot of strength from them.

Everyone's a critic: when you are doing something good, everybody wants to bring you down, and that's something I've been told. People want to see you do good, but not too good.

There's always something that you can learn and something you can teach.

If you have a good support system like your family and your friends around you, then you can't go wrong. So just believe in yourself, do you your thing, and stay strong in what you believe in.

Don't focus on the negativity. Focus on the positivity and the people that want you to do well; then, do it for them and for yourself. Sometimes I do things for myself. Sometimes I do things for my family. Sometimes I do things for my friends.

Don't worry about the pressure or the responsibility. Just live in it, have fun, and when everything seems to be going right, just stay humble and remember your family.

I'm doing pretty good for myself, and I'm very proud and very humbled at where I'm at, and I'm extremely blessed.

Personally, for my character, I started as the silent but deadly type.