It's nice to be able to engage with this fan base that I've worked to build, brick by brick.

I'm not ready to retire, and I think I have some of the best music of my life coming up.

The best thing to do is stare it in the face and move on. We have to face our fears and plow through. I think taking chances takes a lot more courage than staying stagnant and doing what's safe and comfortable.

I think I've grown a lot in the last few years, and I needed to express myself as an artist on this. It wasn't necessarily about going in and making an album chocked full of hit singles... there were a lot of things I did out of the joy and the want to do it.

I don't like the royal family, I don't like the establishment, I don't like the civil service.

For each gene in your genome, you quite often get a different version of that gene from your father and a different version from your mother. We need to study these relationships across a very large number of people.

I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.

At the time of my second marriage, my husband was in his early 50s, I was in my mid-40s, and we each had two kids. We maintained our individual accounts and opened one for the house. We each kick the same percentage of our incomes into the house account and have a joint credit card. But we pay for our children separately.