At one point my dad called me and said, 'You have always been a great salesman. I think it's time you come home and sell swimming pools.'
And I know how many DJ pools have grown and I know how DJing has grown in the overall, but that was the technical side of it to me. DJs were rolling around, looking for stuff to buy and looking to see what was in the store when they get there.
As a young child, I suffered from poor health. My parents encouraged me to swim, which really improved my condition.
I was the poorest kid in my school, poorest kid in my town, poorest family. That stayed with me forever.
Show me a poorly uniformed troop and I'll show you a poorly uniformed leader.
The Ramones were American, and I knew about them, and I thought they were interesting. But they were like a pop band to me.
I used to be the hippest of them all. I used to know everything about everything. I used to read about everything that was going on, and I knew everybody's name and anybody in pop culture. Anything that was written about me, I would read.
It gets quite difficult for me when I listen to pop music. I don't often understand the words, but when someone translates them to me, I think, 'What is this song representing? That women are just there to be treated like objects?'
I didn't like any British music before The Beatles. For me, it was all about black American music. But then I became a successful pop singer, even though the kind of music I liked was more elitist, which is what I'm trying to get back to.
All men that date me have to know that their name may end up in a pop song.
It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.
For me, pop melodies are their own thing that have their own emotion, but they don't necessarily belong exclusively in a pop song.
I really believe in albums, even though some people believe the year of the album has passed. I love singular pop songs or tracks, but what really affects me most deeply is if there's an hour of music or 45 minutes of music that flows really well and tells a story.
I don't want to sing boring pop songs - I want to sing songs that are meaningful to me.
The guys that do have the confidence to hit on me are not necessarily my type, but they think they are because I'm a pop star; I sing songs, do movies. I like to feel sexy and confident on stage.
I've got lots of friends who are musicians, so if they ask me to do things, I'll go and do it for a laugh. I don't want to be a pop star or anything like that.
Luckily for me, when I was growing up in high school, I had a band, and I was a singer in the band. I'm less of a legit Broadway singer than I am a pop-rock singer.
I was offered 'Popeye,' which Robert Altman made. They offered me $2 million to direct that, which was good money. I wasn't interested in it. I don't like that kind of movie.
When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
What I love the most is getting on the ice and just popping in a fabulous CD and skating - all by myself, the rink completely empty, just me and the music.
