Blue jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band. Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man. Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand.

It's so easy to write songs about misery and hard times and sadness. It's much more difficult to write songs about happy and chirpy stuff.

I've dodged so many bullets. Not just because of unsafe sex, but because of the amount of drugs I did, the amount of alcohol, the amount of work I was doing. I started the Elton John AIDS Foundation because I got so lucky.

Make this man a saint now, OK?

I can't talk about - as eloquently as everyone else about a prevention or medicine or, you know, funding, but I can talk about the human element, which is the main part of AIDS, because it comes to the human being and how they are being treated, what medicines they are on and what medicines they are not on.

Once I'd heard 'Modern Times' by Bob Dylan, it really changed the way I wanted to make records.

As a child, as a teenager, I was kind of not allowed to wear fashionable clothes.