Whenever people ask where I get my sick and twisted ideas from, I reply, 'Just open your eyes.'
If you don't open your eyes to other people's lives, you can't even begin to understand how the world works at all.
A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.
Artists are, I think in general, compassionate people, and part of what makes us artists is that we're open-minded people, and I think we're almost, by definition, progressive in a lot of ways.
My idea about the role of artists is to get people to look at things in a way that's different than the way they normally would if they are being told how to think, what to do. I think when people receive information through art, they are more open-minded.
When you're the opener, you're the guy getting the crowd warmed up. But when you're the headliner, you're the main dude. People come to see you, and you have to deliver. It's a cool position to be in.
A lot of people think I was an overnight success, but I was an opening act for three or four years, and then I signed my contract with EMI. Then it kind of blew up overnight.
If you don't know the right people or have the right connections, you may never be discovered. With 'Opening Act,' we are democratizing a notoriously impossible process, pulling back the curtains on a consistently fascinating industry, and affording aspiring artists the chance of a lifetime.
The most important thing is to allow gaps and openings for people to make up their own minds - I don't want my film to be pretending to have one important truth to tell anyone.
I love the idea of bringing my work to the general public, not just people who go to gallery openings.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
I think it's the responsibility of a major opera house not only to cultivate debate and get people thinking, but also to be interfaced with things that challenge them. To challenge its audience and not just deliver things that they know, even though some of those things are wonderful.
Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.
I have never called myself an opera singer. Other people do, but I always call myself a classical singer. I'd love to do opera, but I'm still too young and I don't want to do it until I'm ready. I realise that when I do that it's going to be... up for discussion, shall we say, so I want to get it right.
I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.
My soap operas have been seen by a billion people all around the world.
We've always operated on the thesis that a company can have a personality, that people can be themselves, and be very successful in business at the same time.
I have developed a Zen-like approach to the operating systems that people use: 'When you're ready, the right operating system will appear in your life.'
I appreciate all the devices the Windows people are coming up with, but the operating system... I just want to smash it.
The iPad - contrary to the way most people thought about it - is not a tablet computer running the Apple operating system. It's more like a very big iPhone, running the iPhone operating system.
