Absolutely, it's a really weird stage because at the minute, I can walk down the street and be unrecognised, lead a normal life, but my label and everybody is warning me that will be changing and I'm in for a rollercoaster ride.

I guess if you're stupid enough to join the army without thinking about getting shot at, then you really are a fool.

Like any parents, mine wanted me to have a secure job with a regular wage and career prospects. And the one job my father knew of, that he'd had experience of himself, was the army, so he could help me in that direction.

My life is brillant, My love is pure.

Absolutely, it's a really weird stage because at the minute, I can walk down the street and be unrecognised, lead a normal life, but my label and everybody is warning me that will be changing and I'm in for a rollercoaster ride.

You can't break my spirit, it's my dreams you take.

If the Army helped towards my tuition fees I would then give them four years of my life.

It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.

'Top Gear' changed people's perceptions of me. I've had much more positive responses from my TV appearances than written articles. And I have the weirdest voice.

Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.

I am very happy to say I look just like my dad. But mothers always think their children are prettier than they really are, and mine has always told me I look like Tom Cruise.

I don't agree with superstitious routines, but there are a couple of things I'll always do before performing. I'll get together with the band and chill out, and then, just before I go on stage, I'll always check my flies.

I don't think I picked up the guitar in the first place as a way of getting women. There are probably better ways of doing it.

I have been told by people that I should not be seen clubbing with good-looking women, but I can't see why not. Why be a pop star otherwise?

I have fun with it and I am honest and open about the way I lead my life and don't mislead anyone. I've had the time of my life and thank God for that, it would be such a waste otherwise.

I know I'm a pop star. But sometime I'd like to be a rock star.

I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.

I relax by catching up with my friends and family. When I am at home in Ibiza, I find the contrast of living on a divided island relaxing - with beauty and tranquillity in the north and a sense of fun, shallowness and celebration in the south.

I think having toured the world and seeing many places, I've just been blown away by how we've really scarred our home. I'm as guilty as the next person if not more so. I travel a lot. The damage we do to our planet is huge.

I try to read everything that I can about myself because Saddam Hussein didn't read his reviews and he thought he was winning!

I'm quite British in the sense of not expressing my emotions much. I save it for my songs. If you ask about a death in the family, or a lover, I will not be emotional. I'd probably answer with a smile. Because that's what we British blokes do.

If you have good songs and a real desire to make music, the next thing to do, instead of approach record companies, is to get yourself a really good manager because then it allows you to focus on your profession of being a musician. Then they can focus on the darker art of the record label and the music industry.

In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'

It's always nice to be able to capture your life's experiences in a song and hold the emotion in that way.

My grandparents live in Cley, and my dad now has the windmill which is a guest house. So I've spent much time up there, but a lot of it was at school as well, and my dad was sent abroad so often as well with the army.

School was pretty good about letting me take up music and that's where I had my first musical ideas and first said, 'Yeah, I'm going to be a musician.' I just had to do a quick stop gap in the army first.

Sometimes, reading my own media, the negativity can upset me, but I just deal with things on a positive basis. I mean, I have up to 20,000 people singing my words back to me on a nightly basis - they share my hopes and fears, and they relate to my own life experiences. Life can be pretty isolating, but that connection is always amazing.

The showbiz world has to be manipulated to make it more interesting because most people's lives are boring.

Things take a long time, but when it's right things move fast.

War is devastating, and it leaves its scars for generations.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.