For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and pe...
When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fant...
I've always been a bit of a decorator. I think if I wasn't a singer I'd probably be in stage setting or interior design or something. I like clutter and I'm quite visually greedy. I can't have things to be plain; I have to have things looking interes...
I wouldn't like to live in a castle now, but I'd enjoy a visit to Restormel in Cornwall in its 13th century prime. It's a circular castle with the rooms built against the outer walls and quite intimate in size. Life there wouldn't follow the pattern ...
When I was five years old, I told my parents that I wanted to take ballet. So, ballet was the focus of my life... until puberty. Then I discovered boys and started dating a guy with a mohawk who'd come to my ballet class and freak everybody out. Shor...
People ask me all the time what it is about Australia that produces so many big stars. Honestly, I believe it is a combination of things. Our education standards are quite high, but our industry is very limited. Yet we're very aware of the industry -...
I quite enjoy fame, especially when you go to conventions in America where they treat you like a god with stretch limos and the whole fame thing, but then when you come back to Britain, you end up changing in a toilet in a theatre off West End and th...
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save t...
The Cistercians do not eat meat... Yet they keep pigs to the number of many thousands, and sell the bacon - though perhaps not quite all of it. The heads, legs, and feet they neither give away, throw away, nor sell. What becomes of them God knows.
I was quite cocky, but having been hailed as this great young golfer, I couldn't even make the high school golf team once I got there. I had a big dose of humble pie then, and ever since, I've always known that there is always someone out there bette...
I think of myself as quite a confused kind of person, because I think there's so many great things about the world, but there are so many awful things too. I feel very guilty a lot of the time about enjoying my life so much when there are people livi...
I love ghost stories, and I also have a great fondness and love for 'Quatermass,' which in many ways is the show that preceded 'Doctor Who.' 'Doctor Who' borrowed quite a bit from 'Quatermass' and probably wouldn't have existed in anything like the f...
I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is imme...
I had a really good time working with Jim Cameron. A lot of people didn't, but I did as I got on with him really quite well. For a director who spends most of his time looking down a lens or in the digitisation studio or working out some graphics, he...
Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at deve...
Sometimes I don't go into the studio for quite a while because I haven't found enough good songs. They have to have a certain caliber and connect with me because I'm going to be playing them for the rest of my life. I start off with a circle of frien...
There's a good television programme called 'Disco 2.' It's quite good but again it's average, average. It's all on a down play. You know we've got this thing in England to be hip is to speak very down - like John Peel. And that just about sums up Eng...
It was my very good fortune to find a mentor, Clay Felker, who started my career at the 'New York Magazine' as a freelance writer when I had to quit my job at the 'Herald Tribune' to stay home with my young daughter.
I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply repo...
Well I think if you really go out with someone for quite a long time you do get to know each other very, very well, you go through the good times, you go through the bad times. You know both personally, but also within a relationship as well.
With acting, I've got a character to inhabit. You've got to think about your intentions and your directions. In modeling, even though there's an act to it, a good model is a good model. For me it's uncomfortable territory. You start to feel quite ins...