I suspected my homosexuality, but I'd never acted out on it because I was afraid of sex. It's awful to be afraid of sex.

I've got a great collection of photography.

It took a child. It took a child with a blood transfusion not only to wake me up, but to wake America up, basically. I mean, I read about his plight in a doctor's office in New York in a magazine. I was so outraged about it that I contacted the family. We became friends. I helped them move to another place in Indiana. And we became constant friends.

I used to get my money at the end of the week, buy my mum something, or buy a record, and that was it.

I didn't have sex until I was 23 and that was with a man. I made up for lost time after that in a hurry. I wish I could have had sex when I was, like, 14, 15 or 16 because that's such an exciting age to have sex.

We are all God's people; we have to get along and the [religious leaders] have to lead the way. If they don't do it, who else is going to do it? They're not going to do it and it's left to musicians or to someone else to deal with it.

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.