I came out when I was 15 at school, and I realized I had put myself into a precarious situation. It was a very hostile environment for me, and a lot of kids had it in for me. It was a scary situation. I was very impatient. I wanted to grow up now.

It is a lot of fun being in the Scissor Sisters.

I'm not the easiest person in the world to be partners with. I'm never home. I'm constantly running around the world. I can be impatient. I have a temper. I'm, like, self-obsessed. I'm irritable, self-absorbed.

I've never been great at being really analytical about myself.

What you can say, what French parents say to their kids is, 'You don't have to eat everything, honey, you just have to taste it.' And it's that tasting little by little by little that gets kids more familiar with the food and more comfortable with it and more likely to eat it the next time.

I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.

I think people like to think I'm in some way financially dependent on my family - on my dad - but the fact of the matter is I've been emancipated from my father since I was 14 years old. That's something people don't know or understand.

My parents allowed their two sons to be individuals. My family was a wild and wonderful place, with lots of friends and neighbors visiting and talking loud and eating loud and nobody telling the children to be quiet or putting them down.