I am regarded as a usurper, as an imposter and dilettante, because I do technically come from the wrong side of the tracks in musical terms.

'Prima Donna' is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience.

There's prejudice everywhere. I don't think the music industry is as bad as the movie industry. But I have taken a few hits over the years for my sexuality, and for being honest about my life. In the end, it's the music that rules the roost.

I'm your knight in shining armor. I'm here to save you from Linkin Park.

My mother and father could not handle even me being gay. We never talked about it, really.

I have never cooked a meal in my life and always end up paying for dozens of people to eat with me.

When it came to using elements of your personal life in your work, my mother was the master, or the mistress. There were three or four songs she wrote about my father - songs about failed love.

There is this church that I go to a lot in New York. I'm not religious but I love lighting candles and stuff. I find it useful.

The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.

I'll be honest, I worry sometimes about what I've done. I have tied my whole person to my art and, whatever it takes to get that hook, I will go there and do it.

New York is not the centre for American culture and art that it once was because of the forces of conservatism. Giuliani, capitalism - and then there was 9/11. I really believe that if I leave, it will suffer! Maybe that's why I love it here, because I feel wanted.

I basically have needed to go to the piano and give voice periodically to, you know - I'm always afraid to describe it as a kind of therapeutic process, but nevertheless it was a type of unloading that had to occur due to my personal life with my mother's health or just my professional trials and tribulations.

Places that have experienced great defeat experience a kind of rebirth, which I think America has to do - unless we want to get more decrepit. I don't think we have to destroy the place totally.

I've written songs for Shirley Bassey, Marianne Faithfull, and Linda Thompson. I sort of focus on these wonderful, aging divas. But maybe that's because I think I'm Christina Aguilera.

I could always escape into this demi-monde of homosexuality, which I feel really indebted to. It stopped me being a 'mummy's boy.'

I love being not cool.

I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame.

Premiering a new opera is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, and opening nights of any opera are always pretty stressful.

I am regarded as a usurper, as an imposter and dilettante, because I do technically come from the wrong side of the tracks in musical terms.

I'm hyper light-sensitive and must sleep in the equivalent of a sealed tomb.

The artist who gave me the most inspiration and direction, especially as a singer - and I absolutely consider myself a singer, 100 percent - is Nina Simone. She's my ultimate pianist-singer-type person.

I was reared on folk music.

I've had my ups and downs, and I definitely have a sense - in America, especially - that once you've made your mark and gotten your Rolling Stone piece and your Grammy nomination, that they're on to the next piece of meat, and they don't necessarily like to follow the twists and turns of an artistic career.

I think the minute you mention death, people run for the hills - unless it's heavy metal. People do not like death.

My love of maple syrup. I've been known to knock back a can over a couple days: A swig here, a swig there, and next thing you know it's gone. It's a habit I have to stave off. I don't want to lose all my teeth.

My mother had a lot of parties when I was a child. There'd always be a moment when she would place me on the upright piano and have me sing Somewhere 'Over the Rainbow'.

You know the question: 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' Answer: 'Practise?' Well, in my case, I got there by not practising. I didn't finish my music degree. And when I got into the pop world, I decided not to conform because I figured that the point of being an artist was that you shouldn't be like anyone else.

I am ridiculously high-maintenance.

I have an ounce of Lady Gaga's full-bodied ambition.

Everything I do, I feel is genius. Whether it is or it isn't.