I am travelling half the year around the world, every year, so coming home is one of the most beautiful things.

It is my personality alone that has brought back the waltz and made it a global craze.

I have 120 people in my payroll without any government giving me any money. We live off the tickets and the records I sell. That is very unusual.

I was so busy with my studies that I didn't have a musical idol as a teenager. Later, around my 20s, I suddenly discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones but I guess my musical idol has always been Strauss.

Some parents believe that competition helps prepare children to succeed. Others fear that their children will not be able to handle failure.

I talk to my kids about my mother's energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were.

There's something pure about our bloodline: There are no accidental kids of gay parents. Every single gay parent desperately, passionately wanted to be a parent. That's neat, and I hope we can keep it that way.

I came from a lower-middle-class postwar family in a time of austerity and retrenchment, with no one in the family who was in any way artistic or a potential mentor to a budding writer, and yet this is what I became.