The weird thing was that Soft Cell was supposed to have come and gone before I started the album.

Russia can be quite a dangerous place sometimes, but I never think about it.

The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.

That's what I like to do, I like to make songs.

These days i tend to use one project I do as a kind of offshoot to the next.

As long as ugly people are not on TV, you should only ever have interesting people on TV.

We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.

Knowing what I knew about Russia, as much as I loved the music and was fascinated by the songs and the whole idea of it, I knew it would be a very lengthy and frustrating process.

For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.

The weird thing was that Soft Cell was supposed to have come and gone before I started the album.

It's a shame in a way that people come and go with one album.

I think in the past I think I probably was a little too diverse, probably went from one spectrum to the complete opposite and confusing people.

I think the older I get the more creative I get, I don't have the distractions that I had when I was younger.

That's the way I work and one day I won't have the energy to do it, so I think it's always good to make the most of your life and living as much as possible.

I thinks it really interesting how they throw the world music samples in there. I often wonder what it would be like to do something like that, but use my lyrics and my kind of style.

I mean whatever I do it's important that I put my stamp on it and keep it in my world, whether I'm doing a dance track or something like the Russian album for example.

I don't really have anything against Will Young or Gareth Gates.

As soon as one project is finished I like to go straight on to something else.

I don't enjoy being a celebrity, I don't want any part of that or any part of that fame for fame... i'd actually rather die than be a celebrity slime!!!

My next record I really just want it to be a collection of great songs, classic songs in a way.

Russians have a new freedom, but as long as they don't express that freedom on a public platform.

I think there's always been singers like that and i've done my fair share of cheese as well.

Loyalty is rare. If I find it, I keep it.

I tend to have this perverse reaction to authority and stress: I become more confident and clear when a challenge is enormous.

Aikido means the oneness of the way of the spirit, of being at one with the life force.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

I'm looking forward to being a mom and a wife and a business owner.

My major task was to keep us solvent.

I think London, New York, Paris, Milan, any big city has its own fashion. I don't know why they make such a big thing of Paris. I think maybe it comes from French New Wave films portraying the French girl as very feminine.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

Fight for what you believe in, for if you don't, you will be forever fighting against yourself.

Our daily lives are so mundane, we get taken over by what is immediately in front of us and we don't see beyond that.

I'm concentrating on the positive, on all the wonderful things I'm doing now.

I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A career is something that you train for and prepare for and plan on doing for a long time.

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Be bold and fly toward the unknown. Discover a road that was never known.

It's easier to pick off a fast runner than to pick off a lazy runner.

There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility.

When I miss you, I don't have to go far I just have to look inside my heart because that's where I'll find you.

It's not like there's no work in Scotland, but speak to any actor, and they'll tell you it's limited. So you have to go to London or Manchester to broaden your horizons.

I travel often, so my routine is always getting scrambled. But on a standard sort of day, I get up at 6, pack lunches, hustle the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the dungeon, as I call it: my cobwebby office in the basement.

I am excited about the person that I am becoming.

Probably more than anybody else, I loved Nat 'King' Cole as a performer - not only his singing but his piano playing. Whenever he had a new record come out, I'd get it and try to learn how he was playing. And he was one of the nicest people I'd ever met.

Being an actor helps me direct a little bit, when I do that, which I haven't been able to do that much, but I plan to in the future. There are a lot of reasons for that, but certainly because I feel like you know how to talk to actors, and you know what they need from you if you've been one yourself.