Most of the bad things that have happened to me happened in Denver.

I don't want to leave the house, and I don't want to settle down.

For me, every single thing I do seems to be about the process of letting go because that's what I so desperately need to do with so many things: with fear, with what people think of me, and all these things I've worried about my whole life.

I just feel like this guy who's visiting the music business over the weekend. Every time I write a song, I feel like it's never going to happen again.

Becoming a musician was all about escape. It was about getting away from the foulness that was me.

I had never considered myself a political guy, but there are certain things I can't shut up about. When I hear people say things like, 'If 'we' allow gays to marry, then people will want to marry animals and children,' I can't just stand there.

I'm angry because I was so scared for so many years about just being myself.

Being embraced by the British people is a beautiful compliment for me. It feels very special.

I have to strip away all the layers when I'm writing the song. I have to cut through all these layers of years of putting up walls and putting protective layers around myself.

I'm very proud that I have learned German and Russian. Especially Russian, because of how difficult and beautiful it is and because of how much I struggled in the beginning to get my head around how it works.

I do feel I have a hard time dealing with things being OK.

Madeline Kahn is one of my favourite people in the entire world and one of the funniest. She was a talented Broadway star and also sang opera.

I'm not saying that I don't have skills. I'm saying I don't feel like I can use my skills to achieve self-esteem. I feel like it's cheating. I think that I should have self-esteem simply because I am a human being who deserves love and deserves everything just as much or just as little as everyone else.

There's an incredible amount of pain involved in being a human, but this humorous stuff is essential in overcoming it.

When I came out, I found I hadn't been born with the right genes. It's quite brutal. If you're beautiful and you have the right genes, then the gay scene is a place where you can be worshipped. But if you don't, it's a different ball of wax.

I think the humor, when applied in the right amount, only serves to intensify the other emotions in a given song; it highlights them, makes them stand out.

If I had a good scream, like Frank Black, I'd be doing punk music, 'cos I love that.

Being in school, whenever I laughed or smiled, I would turn to find someone staring at me with this terrible hatred and disgust. I had to control everything - control my voice, control my facial expressions, control my hair and my clothes, and where I walked and where I sat - at every moment. I think that drove me to terrible anxiety.

I loved the whole New Romantic, New Wave thing... New Order, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Blancmange, Yazoo.

'Ernest Borgnine' is sort of my version of Woody Allen's 'Purple Rose Of Cairo' in that it's about the occasional difficulty of coming to terms with the cold hard facts and the temptation to escape into another world - like movies, for example. I'm a pro at escaping.

I could have easily said that I don't believe in anything when I came out of the upbringing that I had, but I do still believe that there is something there, and I have a difficult time figuring it out. I suppose I don't want to be thought of as stupid or unintelligent because I believe that there's something out there bigger than us in the world.

Sometimes I wish I was one of those artists like David Bowie. They're not putting their private lives out there; it's about show and entertainment. But an alter ego is very dangerous for me. Because I am the guy who will become lost in that.

I have trouble with things like Facebook. It presents such a warped vision. I get sick of people's opinions about every little thing and this warped view that everyone is as happy as a pig in garbage.

I realized that a lot of the things I had been telling myself about not being good enough just weren't true, and 'Queen of Denmark' gave me the chance to prove to myself that I could do something real.