Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.

We'd be nowhere without our looks.

There's nothing I like more than being on a dance floor with a thousand people feeling love for humanity.

We never let go. Ever. Even with punctuation. It's frightening. I can't see anyone from any record company ever writing an email to Neil and not getting it back, with corrections.

Chart positions aren't the be all and end all.

We'd have made more, but I kept forgetting to write songs down.

Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad.

When West End Girls came out on import, I was a student at Liverpool University. I'd go to a club in Liverpool and it would come on, and I'd be really embarrassed.

The clubs are good fun-having a laugh, really having a good time.

Electroclash is good because it's stayed underground.

Using music to promote hate seems to be the bastardisation of music to me.

House music is about love, and lots of hip hop is about hate and intolerance, so in that respect, it's not good at all.

Love Comes Quickly is our favourite record ever, and it did really badly.

Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.

I'm beginning to think that you should only be allowed to serve two terms, before madness sets in.

Dance music is about having a good time, and a lot of dance music is very serious now. When progressive house and progressive tech came along, it was kind of serious, but it's all context as well.

I always have a very strong sense of shaming oneself, and you can do that a lot in the public eye, so it's best avoided at all costs I think.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

I feel like the Internet has really freed everything up to an extent, hasn't it? That radio maybe doesn't have quite the power that it had before.

I think sometimes an artist can really lose sight of what made them popular in the first place.

I used to play works in progress to people, but now I wait 'til it's finished, because you make excuses all the time: 'Well, there's gonna be an orchestra on it.' Rather than make excuses, wait 'til it's finished, and then they can say they don't like it.

If I could, I'd be a recluse. I do want to be one. I'm trying really hard. But it's a difficult thing to pull off in this job.

There's a great club in London called The Secret Sundays, and it's on a Sunday afternoon and it's outdoors, and it's mainly Italians that go, and they all look great, and they're dancing on the tables, and life's a party, and they're totally into the music, going mental, and that's when dance music is really fantastic, I think.

Well, I love what you would call boys' music, you know, the prodigy, banging techno, music that girls generally don't like.

Yes, it's a very difficult thing to do, to promote a record, do television shows, and to still want to remain private, it's really quite difficult to explain to people what you're trying to do. I mean I'd actually quite like to be a recluse, but you know, you've got to promote the record as well.

You can get too bogged down in technology and you can sort of forget what it is you were trying to do. And with the Pet Shop Boys it's primarily about the songs, it's about song writing.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music.

Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.

I would just like to say that opera is no longer about fat people in breastplates shattering wine glasses.

I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

I was the first movie star to plunge into night-time soap opera.

In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a 'grand passion' than of a grand opera.

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.

Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

I like soap opera acting. If it's done really well, there's nothing better. It's old school. It's like what those melodramas in the '30s and '40s were like.

Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.

I was on a soap opera before that for three years, where I was the nicest guy on earth.

Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.

I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.