If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

Of one thing there is no doubt: if Paris makes demands of the heart, then Munich makes demands of the stomach.

It's very hard to self-motivate without someone standing over you snarling, ready to hurl the chalk at your head at the slightest slackening.

Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.

I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of Private Eye and a latte.

Of course I'm naughty. I've always had to compete for attention, you see.

In Germany, salads are assemblies of ham and mayonnaise, not trendy tossed leaves.

When I'm called unkind... that really cuts to the quick. You can say anything else that you like about me.

Don't worry about never having time to write. Just write what you can in the time you do have and give yourself a big clap on the back, followed by a double latte and a blueberry muffin.

I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.

I'm worried about looking like a bad person when, in fact, I try to be a good person. I don't like the public image that I've been dressed with and it worries me.

I used to feel like I was drowning. So I stopped trying to swim.

I am called a gold digger all the time. I don't care. There is nothing you can do about what other people say.

Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.

Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

I would love to work on a Bond film.

I am only a little lion, child, and I vow, I shall not savage you.

You are the world and the world is you.

Whatever you can think, you can create; just have a very clear vision... Once you have your snapshot, work on filling in the blanks to get to that place.

The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession; like the honor of a soldier, dearer to him than life.

Mythology, science and space exploration are subjects that have fascinated me since my early childhood. And they were always connected somehow with the music I write.