My greatest experiences in the theatre and the most religious experiences in my life - of which going to the opera is one for me - have been with the Romantic composers' repertoire: it's Wagner, it's Strauss, Verdi, Puccini. That era gets me every time.

When it comes to sitting down and composing, there is no hesitation, no concern, no critics breathing fire down my neck. For me, writing a song is the purest part of all. No one can mess with that.

I think everybody identified at a pretty young age that I was fairly entranced with myself. And that I had to be tempered.

Every video I do is over budget by the time I walk on set. I am massively extravagant in my personal habits.

I very much faced my mother's death with hard, arduous and time-consuming labor. The more I would do, the less I would feel.

Once illness strikes, you realize there's not a lot of time for you to do what you really need to do. And there's no time like the present.

When I was young, my mother [folk singer Kate McGarrigle] brought home this recording of Verdi's Requiem and we listened to it from top to bottom. By the end of it, I was a completely different person. It was literally a requiem mass for my former self. I was about 12 or 13. The Requiem just totally hooked into what I was going through emotionally - discovering my sexuality right at the time when AIDS was devastating my community and dealing with intense parental situations.